Misogyny among straight men is nothing new in our culture.
It’s existed for as long as straight men themselves have existed.
But what if I told you that there’s misogyny among gay men?
“What are you talking about?” you may say. “Gay men love women.”
That may be true, but there’s a dirty little secret in gay male subculture, one that we’ve been keeping for years under a thin shroud that I like to call gay male privilege.
Typically, it’s understood that gay men don’t have any privilege.
We’re still persecuted in many parts of the world, ?including our very own United States, so privilege is usually not a word used to ?describe us.
Mainstream culture likes to focus on the victim ?narrative of LGBT ?individuals, never addressing some obvious discrepancies.
First of all, and perhaps most disturbing to me, is the blatant prioritizing of gay men over lesbians in not just mainstream culture, but even LGBT culture.
Go to any gay bar and you’ll see it: lesbians are treated as second-class ?citizens.
You don’t even have to go to a gay bar to see it.
Just look at, for example, the Gay & Lesbian category on Netflix.
The overwhelming ?majority of films feature gay men. Where are the lesbians?
But it’s not just the gay male subculture’s treatment of lesbians that’s troubling. Its treatment of heterosexual women is just as shameful.
I’m sure you’ve heard the term “fag hag” before.
The straight woman who attracts a plethora of gay men is a cornerstone of popular culture.
Gay male privilege thrives on this idea of the fag hag.
Gay men with female friends consistently use these female friends as objects over which to assert dominance.
“It’s OK because I’m gay,” we say after hurling an insult or making an inappropriate comment about her body.
“Can’t you take a joke?”
“If I were straight, I’d ?totally bang you.”
Could you imagine a straight guy ?saying something like this and getting away with it? ?The average person would be appalled, disgusted and rightfully defend the woman.
So why is it alright for a gay man to say it?
I’m not for a second ?saying that we have more privilege than our straight male counterparts, this is most certainly not true.
But we hold a different kind of privilege: a strange dominance over women that we get away with “because we’re gay.”
But it isn’t really because we’re gay.
It’s because we’re men.
We are men who are products of a ?culture that continuously objectifies and degrades women in an ?inherently sexist society.
Why is it so inherent? Let’s make it so it’s not ?anymore. Just because we’re gay doesn’t make it OK.
Women support gay men, so, as gay men, let’s support women.
Let’s stop objectifying women and then dismissing it simply ?because we don’t want to have sex with them.
Where exactly is the logic in this?
There isn’t any.
zipperr@indiana.edu
