Lesbians: We are not Gay, we are angry! lol
Steve Sailer: "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" National Review 5/30/94; From "Pervert" to "Victim:" The Media's Continued One Dimensional Stereotyping of Homosexuals
A warm Saturday afternoon in late May brings all of Chicago to the lakefront. In the Wrigleyville section of Lincoln Park, softball teams with names like "We Are Everywhere" and "The 10 Percenters" compete with an intensity that could shame the Cubs. Girded for battle with sliding pads, batting gloves, and taped ankles, the short-haired women slash extra-base hits, turn the double play, and hit the cutoff woman with a practiced efficiency that arouses admiring shouts from the women spectators.
Meanwhile, on a grassy lakeside bluff a few blocks to the south, the men of the New Town neighborhood bask, golden, in the sun. If ever a rogue urge to strike a ball with a stick is felt by any of the elegantly sprawled multitude, it is quickly subdued. This absence of athletic strife is certainly not the result of any lack of muscle tone: many have clearly spent the dark months in thrall to SoloFlex and StairMaster. But now, the sun is shining and the men are content for their sculpted bodies to be rather than to do.
As with any other large collection of people, numerous fault lines divide homosexuals, but the most remarkable is the one separating gay men from lesbians. (I use "gay" to refer only to male homosexuals. The media's habit of applying the word to female homosexuals is male chauvinism at its most blatant: "gay" is just about the last term lesbians would have invented to describe themselves. As one lesbian activist succinctly put it, "We're not gay, we're angry!") The current fashion of lumping together as "gays" everybody from Liberacé to Martina Navratilova does something less than justice to the individuals so categorized, to one's own intellectual curiosity, and to the productiveness of public discourse.
Are homosexuals fairly common, like, say, tax-cheaters, lefthanders, or tithe-givers? Or are they fairly rare, like prison inmates, identical twins, or clergy? This is certainly an interesting topic, but why this purely empirical question is thought to possess such moral consequence that many people feel compelled to lie about it is beyond me. Of course, there is much in modern media morals that I am not sensitive enough to understand. On the other hand, the fact that there are relatively few homosexuals answers a common type of objection to my table of tendencies: e.g., "You claim lesbians like softball, but most of the women softball players I know are straight." In response, let's assume lesbians are, say, ten times as likely as heterosexual women to play in an all-woman adult softball league. If 10% of the population was actually lesbian, then a majority of the players would be lesbians. More realistically, however, if only 2.5% of women were lesbians, then straight softball players would outnumber lesbians about 4 to 1.
In contrast, pre-menopausal straight women and gay men typically find golf pointless. For example, despite incessant socialization toward golf, only one out of nine wives of PGA touring pros plays golf herself! And gay male golf fanatics are so rare that it's difficult to even come up with an exception that proves this rule (which might explain why golfers wear those god-awful pants).
Yet, for many other traits, homosexuals exhibit their own sex's tendencies to a heightened degree. For instance, all great classical composers have been male. At least since Tchaikovsky, though, an impressive number of leading composers have been gay or bisexual (e.g., Britten, Copland, Barber, Poulenc, Corigliano, and Bernstein). In comparison, although "Women's Music" festivals play an important role in lesbian culture, their audiences distrust dazzling exhibitions of musical virtuosity, instead preferring simple folk songs with sincere lyrics. Overall, lesbian culture is intensely verbal, a bias that seems to stem from the verbal superiority of women in general, that general feminine superiority with words that is measurable as far back as toddlerhood.
Gay vs. lesbian distinctions are also important for thinking about public policies. Homosexual-related issues like gays in the military, AIDS, and same-sex marriages cannot be discussed realistically without acknowledging the wide differences on average between gays and lesbians. For example, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and the newsweeklies have been trumpeting, despite the highly preliminary nature of the findings, evidence that homosexuality has biological roots. Generally overlooked, however, is that most of the research was performed on gay male subjects by gay male scientists and then hyped by gay male publicists. Going largely unreported is the lesbian population's profound ambivalence about this half-scientific, half-political crusade. (For example, an attack on the theory that lesbianism has biological causes is one of the main themes of Lillian Faderman's fine history of American lesbians, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.) This media reticence is noteworthy, considering that the press otherwise so assiduously keeps us informed of the views of the lesbian-dominated National Organization for Women's on child-rearing, marriage, beauty, men and, of course, What the Women of America Want -- subjects upon which lesbians might be presumed to have rather less expertise to offer than on the question of why they are lesbians.
Many lesbian-feminists deny that their sexual orientation is biologically rooted, attributing it instead to what they perceive as our culture's decision to socialize males to be domineering. They may claim this simply to avoid contradicting feminist theory, which is, well, "biophobic." (Yes, I know that this trendy practice of insinuating that those who disagree with you politically must suffer from a mental disorder is reminiscent of the imprisoning of Soviet dissidents in psychiatric hospitals, but, hey, once you get the hang of it, it's kind of fun.) On the other hand, the lesbian-feminists might be right and the gay researcher/activists wrong about the nature of homosexuality. Or, homosexuality might not have a single nature: at minimum, there could be a fundamental difference between lesbians and gays.
Beyond homosexual-related issues, this gay vs. lesbian dichotomy can cast new light on many social questions. Fundamentally, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, almost all American social controversies rest on conflicting assumptions about human nature. Is it infinitely malleable? If not, what are its constraints? Whatever other purposes there are for our existence, we know evolution has shaped human nature to promote reproduction. To study reproduction is to study sex and sexuality. To understand heterosexual men and women is difficult without studying homosexual men and women as a frame of reference.
For instance, honest discussion of the differences between lesbians and gays would also generate fresh insights into what feminists imperialistically call "women's" issues. While feminist theory is largely immune from radical questioning in most of the prestige media, few people actually take it seriously . . . especially feminists. They seldom pay their own theory the respect of treating it like a scientific theory and testing it against the evidence. If feminist theory is truly an attempt to make accurate predictions about reality, rather than simply an elaborate rationalization for blaming your troubles on somebody else, then feminists should welcome a frank appraisal of the contrasting longings and ambitions of gays and lesbians, since this offers fascinating new perspectives from which to assay feminist hypotheses.
For example, feminists tirelessly denounce the fashion and beauty industry for brainwashing American men into craving skin-deep feminine beauty. But which is truly the cause and which is the effect? Luckily, the curious analyst can study people who have rejected heterosexual socialization: among homosexuals, the distinctiveness of men's and women's basic sexual urges is especially vivid. Since "Women Seeking Women" don't need to entice men's visually-focused desires, their newspaper personal ads tend toward wistful vagueness: Attractive SWF, bi, seeking SF, feminine & discreet, any race, for friendship and possible rltnshp. In contrast, the "Men Seeking Men" classifieds bristle with statistics quantifying appearance: John Wayne-type (41, 6'3" 210#, C 46" W 35", brn/grn) seeks Steve Garvey-type (muscular, str8-acting, 20-30, under 6' & 185#, blu eyes a +).
Even more egregiously swept under the rug by feminists like Naomi Wolf (author of The Beauty Myth) is the central creative role of gay men in the fashion business. Thus, feminist pundits routinely portray the current fad in haute couture for "waif" models (young girls lacking in the more popular secondary sexual characteristics) as a conspiracy against women hatched by . . . yes, you guessed it, The Male Power Structure. This accusation always conjures up for me a vision of Alan Greenspan, Bill Gates, and Colin Powell resolving in secret conclave to put uppity women back in their place by ordering Vogue to print a lot of pictures of girls who look like boys.
Feminists' widespread (though hushed-up) exasperation with gay men probably originates in the perennial struggle of the "women's movement" to enlist enough Indians for its ample supply of chiefs. In this battle for the hearts and minds of the female masses, it is the gay imagination that so often crystalizes the misty yearnings of femininity into those beguiling baubles and alluring images that help seduce heterosexual women away from the stern precepts of feminism. Would bridal magazines be 800 pages long without the endlessly creative genius of gay men who make their livings subverting and sabotaging feminism's war on femininity.