Nov 10 2023
Great stuff from Stoltenberg
…[T] male-dominated gay liberation movement never really grasped how homophobia is rooted in the woman hating that is a fixture of male supremacy. Quite simply, the male homosexual is stigmatized because he is perceived to participate in the degraded status of the female …
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The system of male supremacy requires gender polarity—with real men as different from real women as they can be …
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The threat of homophobic insult or attack not only keeps men aimed at women as their appropriate sexual prey; it also keeps men ‘real men’.
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The political reality of the gender hierarchy in male supremacy requires that we make it resonate through our nerves, flesh, and vascular system just as often as we can. We are supposed to respond orgasmically to power and powerlessness, to violence and violatedness; our sexuality is supposed to be inhabited by a reverence for supremacy, for unjust power over and against other human life. We are not supposed to experience any other erotic possibility; we are not supposed to glimpse eroticized justice. … [Y]ou come to the point where you have to impose hierarchy on ever sex act you attempt—otherwise it doesn’t feel like sex.
from “You Can’t Fight Homophobia and Protect the Pornographers at the Same Time—An Analysis of What Went Wrong in Hardwick,” John Stoltenberg.
fiction
