Subject: Re(2): Sexism/Male Privilege

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Amsbary)
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 95 11:14:03 PST

Exerpted without permission from  the book "Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism" by
Suznne Pharr.  Copywrite 1988 by Suzanne Pharr, published by Chardon Press
available through The Women's Project, 2224 Main, Little Rock, AR 72206.

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HOMOPHOBIA -  the irrational fear and hatred of those who love and sexually
desire those of the same sex.  Though I intimately knew its meaning, the word
homophobia was unknown to me until the late 1970's, and when I first heard it
I was struck by how difficult it is to say, what an ugly words it is, equally
as ugly as its meaning.  Like racism and anti-Semitism, it is a word that
calls-up images of loss of freedom, verbal and physical violence, death.

In my life I have experienced the effects of homopohobia through rejection by
friends, threats of loss of employment, and threats upon my life; and I have
witnessed fat worse things happening to other lesbian and gay people: loss of
children, beatings, rape, death.  Its power is great enough to keep ten to
twenty percent of the population living lives of fear (if there sexual
identity is hidden) or lives of danger (if their sexual identity is visible)
or both.  And its power is great enough to keep the remaining eighty to ninety
percent of the popu;lation trapped in their own fears.

PATRIARCHY - an enrforced belief in male dominance and control - is the
ideology and sexism is the system that holds it in place.  The catechism goes
like this; Who do gender roles serve?  Men and women who seek power from them.
 WHo suffers from gender roles?  Women most completly and men in part.  How
are gender roles maintained?  By the weapons of sexism: economics, violence,
homophobia.

HOMOPHIBIA  works effectively as a weapon of sexism because it is joined with
a powerful arm, heterosexism.  Heterosexism creates the climate for homphobia
with its assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual and its display
of power and privilege as the norm.  Heterosexism is the systemic display of
homophobia in the institutions of society.  Heterosexism and homphobia work
together to enforce compulsory hetersexuality and the bastions of
patriarchical power, the nuclear family.  The central focus of the rightwign
attack against women's liberation is that women's equality, women's self
determination, women's control of our bodies and lives will damage what they
see as the crucial societal institution, the nuclear family.  The attack has
been lead by fundamatenalist ministers accross the country.  The two areas
they have focused on the most consistently are abortion and homosexuality, and
their passion has lead to the bombing of abourtion clinics and to recommend
deprogramming for homosexuals and estabolishing camps to quarantine people
with AIDS.  To resist marriaage and/or heterosexuality is to risk sever
punishment and loss.

To be a lesbian is to be *perceived* as someone who has stepped out of line,
who has moved out of sexual/economic depenence on a male, who is
woman-identified.  A lesbian is perceived as someone who can live without a
man, and is therefore (however illogically) against men.  A lesbian is
percieved as being outside the acceptable, routinized order of things........A
lesbian is percieved as a threat to the nuclear family, to male dominance and
control, to the very heart of sexism.

Gay men are percieved also as a threat to male dominance and control, and the
homophobia expressed against them has the same roots in sexism as does
homophobia against lesbians.  Visible gay men are the objects of extreem
hatred and fear by heterosexual because their breaking the ranks with male
heterosexual solidarity is seen as a damaging rent in the very fabric of
sexism.  They are seen as betrayers, as traitors who must be punished and
eliminated.  In the beating and killing of gay men we see clear evidence of
this hatred.  When we see the fierce homophobia expressed toward gay men, we
can begin to undersatnd the ways sexism affects males through imposing tigid,
dehumanising gender roles on them.........When gay men break ranks with male
roles through bonding and affection outside the arenas of war and sports, they
are percived as not being "real men," that is, as being identified with women,
the weaker sex that must be dominated and that over the centuries has been the
object of male hatred and abuse.  Misogony gets transfered to gay men with a
vengeance and is increased by the fear that their sexual idenity and behavior
will bring down the entire ssyetm of male dominance and compulsory
heterosexuality.

We know that the arguments about homophobia originating from mental health and
Biblical/religious attitueds can be settled when we look at the sexism that
permeates religious and psychiatric history.

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