Discrimination rooted in masculinity.

[chimx]

I work in a fairly conservative area and deal with a lot of bigotted attitudes with my coworkers. From my experience, social discrimination directed towards certain ethnicities is generally the most strong when it is a male targeting another male. Threats to masculinity, especially when one defines self-worth and identity around the value of masculity, seem to aggravate ethnic relations.

Similar cases can be seen in discriminatory attitudes toward gays. gay lifestyles are viewed as antithethcial to masculine-centric identity, and as a result, a threat to it. enough proof for this lays in the fact at how common one hears bigoted words condoning same-sex relationships between gay women, but condemning the same relationships between men. i.e.: "i like the idea of two woman making out, but two men making out is a perversion."

I don't mean to suggest that masculinity and masculine-centric identities are the sole cause of discriminatory attitudes. Certainly the historical social economy, cultures, etc. have played an impact, and obviously discriminatory attitudes have a tendency of self-perpetutating themselves within certain cultures. But I would be curious to hear if any of you think that masculinity, that is to say, a warped perception or understanding of masculinity, has a particularly strong influence on discriminatory attitudes.

[apathy maybe]

A few thoughts,

Women often find the idea of two men "making out" attractive and sexually exciting, and at the same time find the idea of two women doing the same thing equally repulsive.

One way to challenge anti-gay feeling is to ask why men object to men having sex with other men. You ask this rhetorically, and then talk about how you thought it would be better if more men were gay. Because then there would be more women for you! Of course, this is not really an approach to take in progressive company, though I don't you would need to.


Of course, the question is, what does "masculinity" mean? What does being a "man" mean? It might be worth exploring these issues and then showing (if possible) how these concepts are not incompatibly with both gay men and with people with different skin colour.

[chimx]

Well I didn't necessarily mean this to be a thread on how to combat discrimination. I've just noticed a correlation between bigoted attitudes and masculine identity.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 11, 2007 05:12 am
But I would be curious to hear if any of you think that masculinity, that is to say, a warped perception or understanding of masculinity, has a particularly strong influence on discriminatory attitudes.
Sure, this is a well known fact. Particularly there is a relationship between repressed masculine homosexuality and racial discrimination. It is very noticeable in white supremacist talks about blacks being rapists of white women; it was also a strong component of Nazi anti-semitism, in which grand fantasies of Jewish men "polluting" white women in a sexual manner were quite prominent.

Luís Henrique

[counterblast]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 11, 2007 12:41 pm
One way to challenge anti-gay feeling is to ask why men object to men having sex with other men. You ask this rhetorically, and then talk about how you thought it would be better if more men were gay. Because then there would be more women for you! Of course, this is not really an approach to take in progressive company, though I don't you would need to.


Because objectifying women as lap dogs is totally combatitive to heterosexism!

[apathy maybe]

Of course I understand your point. However, this sort of man would often already have problems, which is why I said not to use it in progressive company. Secondly, what is wrong with having sex with women anyway?

[counterblast]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 14, 2007 11:32 am
Of course I understand your point. However, this sort of man would often already have problems, which is why I said not to use it in progressive company.

Secondly, what is wrong with having sex with women anyway?
We all have problems, and issues we don't understand. I don't find that an appropriate excuse to make sexist remarks that further elaborate on this individuals prejudiced ideology. You're essentially masking homophobia by making the sexist implication that women are the brainless commodities of men and if the population suddenly turned gay; we would flock in dispair to the first man that picked us.

[apathy maybe]

No offence, but do you know what you are talking about? Because I didn't mean anything of the sort. I can see how the comment might be considered sexist (and I acknowledge that, which is why I said to only use it around men who wouldn't have a problem with that sort of thinking (who haven't had their consciousness raised as it were)), but the rest of what you are saying?

[TC]

Originally posted by Counterblast


Because objectifying women as lap dogs is totally combatitive to heterosexism!...

... I don't find that an appropriate excuse to make sexist remarks that further elaborate on this individuals prejudiced ideology. You're essentially masking homophobia by making the sexist implication that women are the brainless commodities of men and if the population suddenly turned gay; we would flock in dispair to the first man that picked us.

I think its pretty obvious that apathy maybe is, to put it mildly, hardly the most sophisticated when it comes to issues of sex and gender relations (as his suggestion was a totally implausible way to “challenge anti-gay feeling”), but I think you’re totally reading something into his comment that wasn’t there. What you’re responding to has nothing to do with what he was saying, he wasn’t objectifying women as lap dogs or anything else.

He was just point out, that the fewer men are interested in women in any particular social setting, the less competitive it is for those men who are interested in women to find partners. I think this should be pretty obvious and it doesn’t really reflect on anything other than basic arithmetic, and obviously it works equally the other way around (the fewer straight women and the more lesbians, the better selection each straight woman has of straight men as fewer of them would have partners). Or, to put it another way, for every gay person of the same sex above the number of gay people of the opposite sex, you would expect there to be another single straight person of the opposite sex, and the more single people of the opposite sex there are, the easier it is for heterosexuals to find partners...there’s nothing remotely sexist about this observation.

And, frankly, its kind of disturbing to me to see someone accused of sexism and thinking women were “brainless commodities”, simply because he made a comment that assumed mutual sexual desire between men and women. To me, I think more than him, you’re the one presuming that women are “brainless” if the assumption that some of us might actually have our own sexual desires towards men is dismissed as “objectifying women”, as that implies that women or non-lesbian women have no sexual agency.

In saying that i don't want to come over as being too harsh as i know that wasn't your intent but i think you need to think through the full logical ramifications and implications of your positions in order to have them hold up consistently.