William Alexander Johnson asks:
I always make sure to read your blog, and a while ago a Marginal-Revolution-type question popped into my mind:
Is homophobia the only form of hatred that doesn't have an economic component?
As far as I can tell, most hatreds between different peoples are caused to a great extent by economic conflicts. Whites vs. blacks in the U.S., Europeans vs. natives in former European colonies, Christianity vs. Judaism vs. Islam, locals vs. immigrants in countries across the world, animosity between different castes in India, and even killings of supposed witches in tribal societies all have very important economic dimensions.
But homophobia seems to have absolutely no economic component. I've heard that homosexuals are on average a little more economically successful than heterosexuals, but I very seriously doubt that that has the slightest bit to do with anything.
I can't think of any other form of hatred so divorced from "rational" conflict, so to speak.
…What do you think?
Bryan Caplan predicts greater tolerance in the future and Andrew Sullivan sees positive trends. I do favor both gay marriage and other advances in gay rights, but when I scan the evidence, I am a bit pessimistic. The positive short-run momentum is clear, but what about the longer run? I see the following:
1. Prejudice and bullying against gay individuals is often brutal and unreasonable and it is applied where there is no evidence of harm from gays. The prejudice is often strongest among teenagers and young males, and it weakens somewhat with age and socialization.
2. Strong prejudices against gay men and women are found in every culture I know of, past or present. And yet in many cases homosexuality "limits the competition," so to speak. This potential gain finds little appreciation.
3. There is a common and sometimes strong "disgust reaction," especially to gay men.
4. We learn from John Boswell that high levels of gay tolerance, in antiquity, were followed by a counter-reaction and higher levels of prejudice.
5. Religion, conservative morals, and sexual traditionalism make periodic comebacks.
Looking at the overall pattern, I wonder whether many individuals have a natural, innate proclivity to dislike gay men and women and to feel discomfort with the entire idea of homosexuality, bisexuality too of course. Those preferences are not universal and they can be mediated by positive social forces, but left to their own devices, they will periodically reemerge in strength.
Bullies bully who they can get away with bullying.
“Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said in a statement Wednesday that his group considers Clementi’s death a hate crime.”
Was the girl who hung herself killed by a…”hate crime?”
Some guys make tolerance so hard.
Well… bearing and raising children is a huge economic cost.
@ Andrew:
The past tense of hang (to kill by suspending from a rope) is hanged, not hung.
Thanks for continuing to make hating stupid bigots so easy.
My guess is that there’s probably a Malthusian component to it too that’s hard wired. Anecdotally there’s more anti-gay prejudice in ‘settler’ societies (Boer South Africa or the rougher parts of the Anglosphere) or in settled ones facing Malthusian pressure. Same might go for some of the more virulent forms of racist nationalism; the 14th and 16th centuries in Germany come to mind.* Germans went on a genocidal rampage at home and found some more ‘living space’ to the east. They did this because of a lack of food. The Germans of the year 2010 don’t have any mounting issues with population pressure, so they can afford to be more tolerant.
*I am NOT dropping an H-bomb here.
“Thanks for continuing to make hating stupid bigots so easy.”
You don’t read here much do you?
Dick,
The point is that I’ve never seen Tyler produce a post about run-of-the mill bullying, the kind that affects more people and does more damage than group-identity-based bullying.
Are gay people more important than other people because they are gay? If so, that explains everything.
The meta-point is that you address a grammatical error that is common enough for you to know it. So, either you are an anal English professor and noone cares, or you are just being a prick. You are one of the people who Stanley Fish was referring to. Maybe if Jon Stewart reads here you scored a point with him and the two other progressives.
If there is a hard-wired “revulsion” factor at play, then I think Cowen’s correct about the cyclical nature of this kind of tolerance.
Maybe it’s more a matter of degree, a position along the spectrum of tolerance – from begrudging but disciplined endurance of things you truly despise to acceptance and indifference to full-on celebrational encouragement.
I can easily imagine the sinusoidal in that time-series chart.
People act as if gayness were a contagious disease. Maybe there’s some brain mechanism that’s misfiring or can’t properly distinguish.
*economic impact
Certainly homosexual behavior is condemned by most traditional purity codes. That may be at the root of much traditional prejudice.
Could there be a public health component? That appears to be the sub-text for many of the ancient ritual purity codes. Could that be an issue in many of the traditional condemnations of homosexuality?
For evolutionary reasons, parents do not want their children to be gay. An intolerant atmosphere helps parents convince children with homosexual tendencies to reproduce.
I think you have to look to relative rank, not absolute levels.
This is totally speculative, but it does cohere with sociobiology. There is a sexual marketplace (duh), and women actually have more power. The most powerful person in a bargaining situation is the person who can most afford to walk away from the deal. Women have the option of walking away from monogamy because they can breed with an alpha male. They lose the father’s investment in their children, but they gain better quality genes in return. Thus women have a higher “baseline” in a bargaining situation. That gives them the power.
Of course, men have what is called a superior threat advantage. They are stronger and more violent. Historically men have used their threat advantage to seize the upper hand. In liberated times that threat advantage is effectively lost. So we are heading to a new equilibrium in which women have the power, at least over beta males. One way for men to respond is with strong norms of lifelong monogamy. But that faces a collective action problem, and runs counter to what intellectuals believe about sexuality.
The other option is to cut a better deal for themselves. I suspect that some men respond by underbidding. Men who are feminine or submissive are implicitly offering women a deal in which they will accept lower status in the relationship in return for sexual access. Of course, this hurts other men for the same reason that someone underbidding their wages hurts other workers. The cartel of males is being eroded. Thus males enforce the strength of their cartel by scorning men who are not sufficiently masculine.
I think it’s pretty obviously a psychological issue. People despise others when those other display traits that the first individual fears he may display. That’s not to say all gay bashers are secretly gay themselves (but that’s certainly not uncommon) but rather that men taught to fear femininity in themselves will despise other men who display those traits. By despising these nonconformists, the despisers reassure themselves that they themselves are not nonconformist. Like many social ills, it is driven by a sense of insecurity and fear.
“Strong prejudices against gay men and women are found in every culture I know of, past or present.”
What about ancient Greece and Rome?
Also, I vaguely recall discussing a modern day tribal society that had open man/boy relationships in a psychology of sex class I took at university but that was over 10 years ago and can’t recall the name of it.
1. Wrong: homophobia is strongest among older generations
2. Correct only when you assume, implausibly, that one sex has higher rates of homosexuality than the other.
3,4,5. Meh.
Hi Blake,
most men have to work hard to conform to the expectations of masculinity. It’s a terrible deal
Our theories are pretty congruent, but I do take issue with this. In the Brave New World men will have an even more raw deal. There will be a much more inegalitarian distribution of sexual access to females. Thus men face a situation of tournement economics and will have a massive incentive to become one of the lucky alphas. This will result in a brutal competition for alpha status. I think men have more work to do in this situation.
It is true that those who drop out will find things much easier, but the cost of this is lower status compared to their wives and other males.
To me it seems like a lose-lose situation except for the natural alphas.
Justin,
Even they’re likely to see losses, as it’s very hard to protect a life from a dedicated killer who doesn’t care if he dies.
BenK. Economics pretends that it is always all about money.
Nope, economics is all about utility. Economists are very clear that wealth consists of goods and services, with money being a simple medium of exchange. It’s the mercentalists who mistake money for wealth.
I’d also like to see a separate post about bullying, particularly bullying in the work-place.
I think that most attempts by modern Americans to do an armchair economic analysis of homophobia are doomed, because modern American homosexuality is different from most (almost all) historic expression of homosexuality. Historically typical male homosexuality has the pattern of older/more powerful/higher status men being the “top” and younger/wearer/lower status men being the “bottom”. The “bottoms” didn’t often have much choice in the matter.
In many societies, historically (and in the present), being a “top” doesn’t make a man homosexual; only (voluntarily) being a “bottom” does.
I’m not sure where this leads to in terms of either economic analysis, or of the purity/disgust component of morality, but it certainly seems that any analysis of homophobia should deal with homosexuality the way it has been experienced through most of history, not the way it is in the U.S. today.
Check out this hate crime:
http://gothamist.com/2010/09/29/rutgers_students_appalled_over_vide.php
Some people will just use any excuse to be a douche.
Orwell’s seminal “Politics and the English Language” could stand fresh updating, to cover new cases where language attempts to lead thought.
“Homophobia” was a case in point even before someone elected to coin “islamophobia”. Lazy journalists and entertaining media personaities feeding an increasingly suspecting public poorly educated by lazy educators continue to foist such handy coinage. Control of the terms being used in political discourse signals where the dominant power lies in the conduct of the debate, as ever. And when the terms are this disingenuous . . . .
The notion that a dim (and, by default, heterosexual) regard for homosexuality derives from “irrational fear” is now making its way into judicial rulings (although, truth be told, what does the “rationality” of matrimony consist of?); whereas any disdain, dislike, or distaste heterosexuals may legitimately have for homosexuality (in terms of religion, ethics, or aesthetics, domains which themselves are not necessarily well measured by any metric of “rationality”) can well be based in terms of economic interest (which may rise to the level of “rationality”).
Feminists in corporate culture have long found willing partners among homosexuals in corporate culture, collaborating to push and pull each other up corporate ladders. No need to pity heterosexual males or females in corporate culture, but what heterosexual would have an abiding interest in seeing a homosexual advanced simply because of corporate political connections derived from close collaboration with a disaffected feminist? In failing to call for the priveleging of homosexuals and/or feminists in corporate culture, am I homophobic or anti-feminist? Or am I merely a disaffected heterosexual?
Perhaps it’s simply an uncanny valley effect. We feel the sharpest revulsion towards those who are similar to us in nearly every way, but differ in one seemingly vital aspect.
This theory is supported by the fact that antipathy towards homosexuality is sharpest towards one’s own sex, and lesser towards the opposite sex. It is sharpest towards our contemporaries in our own culture; who, for instance, really gets worked up about the ancient Greeks? And observing animals like lizards or bonobos engaging in same-sex copulation elicits a chuckle at best.
We are more creeped out by Invasion of the Body Snatchers than by War of the Worlds.
It is true that “high levels of gay tolerance, in antiquity, were followed by a counter-reaction and higher levels of prejudice”. But the same is true of cosmopolitan societies in general, where people of many different ethnicities coexisted, sometimes for centuries, but (crucially) did not fuse in a melting pot. Cordoban Spain was succeeded by the Spanish Inquisition that drove out Jews and Muslims; the Ottoman Empire was succeeded by militant Turkishness that had no place for Armenians and continues to suppress Kurdish culture to this day. And some of the bitterest internecine wars have been between people of different religions who share a language and many aspects of common culture: the troubles in Northern Ireland, the bloody mess in the former Yugoslavia. Again, this may be an uncanny valley effect.
This history, by the way, suggests that one of the ways the West might become less moral in the future will be by sharply lower acceptance of pluralism and diversity, and greater emphasis on assimilation and conformity to majority norms. But that will not affect only gays; in fact, it might not affect them at all: remember it was the gay-friendly ancient Greeks who coined the word “barbarian”.
Isn’t homophobia easily explained as a variation on tribalism? We’re naturally wary toward things that are different from ourselves. We’ll even learn to “hate” and divide ourselves based on our favorite college football teams.
I really think that in this case it’s the policing gender roles explanation others have mentioned; hostility to homosexuality has historically been virtually universal for the same reasons that strong opinions about what are acceptable behaviors for men and what are acceptable behaviors for women have historically been universal, as the former is just a special case of the latter.
You’ve got the truly gay-hating, you’ve got the gay-supporting, and you’ve got the gay-disinterested. This third category is where I place myself. I don’t care if you’re gay. Whatever. Who you prefer as a sexual partner makes no difference to me.
However, I have a little patience for anyone talking about their ‘plight’ for being a member of any class. Gay, sraight, white, black, asian, short, tall, fat, skinny, rich, poor. Suck it up. Life is hard all around.
Perhaps you can take that as my being prejudiced against whiners. Whinophobia (not to be confused with Winophobia).
The problem with this is that the more time you spend blaming a particular trait for your hardships, the less interested I am in helping you. People have tunnelvision (and confirmation bias). Too often the issue is not that you are class X, but it will be claimed that it is. I don’t dislike you because of your sexuality, race, socioeconomic status. I dislike you because you’re just not a pleasant person.
This will, by the person in question, possibly be interpreted as my prejudice against them, and reinforce their persecution complex, divorcing them from reality and making it less likely that the problem can be solved.
This is not to say that there is no racism, sexism, etcism. Just that when all you have is a hammer….
And the reason that this is relevant to the discussion is that you have to actually be able to define the bounds of the behaviour if you’re going to measure what influences it.
Perhaps homosexual males are sending masochistic signals and those with sadistic impulses are responding to those signals.
Far-fetched?
“Homosexuality could become very rare in the future. It could be medically treatable.”
Or maybe maybe both heterosexuals and homosexuals will modify themselves so that they become bisexual. More choice.
Thanks to Prof. Cowen and everyone else for their thoughts (I’m the guy who asked the question).
@Chris R: “My guess is that there’s probably a Malthusian component to it too that’s hard wired. Anecdotally there’s more anti-gay prejudice in ‘settler’ societies (Boer South Africa or the rougher parts of the Anglosphere) or in settled ones facing Malthusian pressure. Same might go for some of the more virulent forms of racist nationalism; the 14th and 16th centuries in Germany come to mind.* Germans went on a genocidal rampage at home and found some more ‘living space’ to the east. They did this because of a lack of food. The Germans of the year 2010 don’t have any mounting issues with population pressure, so they can afford to be more tolerant.†
Huh? Since homosexuals can’t have children, doesn’t that mean they put LESS pressure on the population?
@Sleepy_Commentator: “Homosexual males are, in the heteronormative terms of a society, inherently peripheral, solitary (unmated) males, without much in the way of obvious kin relation or support. (In a society with homophobic mores, they may actually lack these linkages.) Thus, in any circumstance where it is advantageous for a potential aggressor to affirm or display his ability to ‘police’ society, or successfully engage in violence against heterogenous persons, they will be a tempting target of opportunity.†
I think that’s just begging the question. It’s easy to pick on homosexuals, because everyone’s picking on them, because they’re easy to pick on! But where did those norms come from? Are you suggesting that they perhaps came about more or less randomly?
@Sleepy_Commentator: “If one thinks of it in terms of resource expenditures and relative utilities, it makes a certain sense that the tendency would enjoy a modest degree of reproductive selection.†
I suppose that’s true, although that leaves us with the question of how homosexuality itself ended up having reproductive selection. Which I guess Richard Mason tries to get at.
@Johnny: “I would think not being able to produce an heir and/or advance the growth of Earth’s most valuable capital, human labor, would have significant [economic] impact. Don’t you?†
Do you mean that heterosexuals might dislike homosexuals because they don’t produce human capital? But that wouldn’t explain why homophobia was widespread in certain times and places even under Malthusian pressure, when offspring were more of a liability than an asset.
@Leigh Caldwell: “But perhaps our choice of sexual partner is such a dominant factor in our identity that we (some of us) elevate our lack of understanding of others’ preferences to the level of distaste or hatred.†
Hmm, that seems far-fetched to me.
@Careless: “Seriously, he leads off with whites versus blacks as an economic issue?†
And you don’t think it is? Are you kidding? Slavery, Jim Crow laws†¦
@Justin Martyr: “Men who are feminine or submissive are implicitly offering women a deal in which they will accept lower status in the relationship in return for sexual access. Of course, this hurts other men for the same reason that someone underbidding their wages hurts other workers. The cartel of males is being eroded. Thus males enforce the strength of their cartel by scorning men who are not sufficiently masculine.†
But we’re not talking about homosexuals, not metrosexuals! Homosexual men aren’t offering women much of anything†¦.
@Blake: “In order for this strict binary to remain in place, men have to act in certain ways.†
But like I said to Justin Martyr†¦
@Richard Mason: “My theory is that it’s a green beard effect.
http://robotics.caltech.edu/~mason/ramblings/homosexualGreenBeard.html†
Hmm, that’s very interesting. But plenty of heterosexuals are homophobic, and plenty of homosexuals aren’t. Yeah, closet homosexuals might be more likely to be homophobic, but are they really THAT much more likely?
@Anthony: “Historically typical male homosexuality has the pattern of older/more powerful/higher status men being the “top” and younger/wearer/lower status men being the “bottom”. The “bottoms” didn’t often have much choice in the matter.†
I realize that was the case in ancient Greece, but is that really the typical pattern?
@oblong: “but more than these I reckon is that each threatens the others sense of power – you may want to think of this ‘fear’ as irrational but then who ever said the species was rational [Aquinas]. It’s entirely natural for a heterosexual male to feel somewhat homophobic just as it’s completely natural for a homosexual male to feel somewhat heterophobic – and for that matter for a pretty girl to fear all men are pigs†
How in the world do heterosexuals and homosexuals threaten each other’s power?
@Edward Burke: “Feminists in corporate culture have long found willing partners among homosexuals in corporate culture, collaborating to push and pull each other up corporate ladders. No need to pity heterosexual males or females in corporate culture, but what heterosexual would have an abiding interest in seeing a homosexual advanced simply because of corporate political connections derived from close collaboration with a disaffected feminist?†
But homophobia existed long before feminism….
@Kevin Postlewaite: “Sometimes prejudice isn’t about the target group (what would Robin Hanson say?). Homophobia may be signaling: 1) signal membership to a social group (conservative/religious) 2) signal masculinity for men†
I think number 2 might have a lot of merit. As Michael Kimmel argues in Guyland, practically the entire lives of many young men revolve around not appearing gay.
@Jim: “You think al-Qaeda hates all non-Muslims for economic reasons?
You think lefties look down on servicemen for economic reasons?
You think righties dislike polygamists for economic reasons?†
I think if the Muslim world were as developed as the West, al-Qaeda wouldn’t exist. And lefties “looking down† on servicemen or righties “disliking† polygamists hardly reach the status of hatred the way that homophobia does for many people.
@Doug: “Isn’t it likely that in the not too distant past (and for a LOOOOONG time before that) tribes/groups that eliminated members who consumed resources but did not reproduce (especially in times of scarce resources) had a survival advantage over groups that did not eliminate those members? Isn’t that all it takes to explain homophobia? Doesn’t the widespread existence of homophobia go a long way towards confirming this hypothesis?†
Yeah, like Sleepy_Commentator said. In fact, I suppose it’s funny that I’m asking why homophobia exists, when perhaps the real biological mystery is why homosexuality exists. It’d be interesting, though, if there’s any actual evidence of homophobia being partly genetic, as opposed to just speculation.
@A: “Why is it that the most masculine men (blue-collar workers, soldiers, combat sport athletes etc) are also the most homophobic? Why do they have to signal masculinity?†
I think you’re thinking in terms of A causing B when it’s really C causing A and B. Namely, guys who (for whatever reason) feel an excessive need to signal masculinity often do so both by being athletes (or whatever) and by being homophobic.
“I think if the Muslim world were as developed as the West, al-Qaeda wouldn’t exist.”
Please confront your words with the immense count of bearded fanatics coming either from oil-rich monarchies of the Gulf, or from student circles of the West. Organizations like Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which prefer to recruit educated middle-class people, come to mind.
Religious and political fanaticism is actually “cool” in intellectual circles of developed countries. Maoism, Trotskyism, Nazism and Islamism were, to a large part, formed by well-off ideologues. German students helped Hitler to power very eagerly etc. It has zero to do with economics per se; some people just love to hate, and the intellectuals among them have enough time to study all the grievances and pseudo-grievances of the last 2000 years, becoming more radicalized in the process.
Hi WillJ,
But we’re … talking about homosexuals, not metrosexuals! Homosexual men aren’t offering women much of anything†¦.
First of all, that may not be true. There is often an evolutionary basis for homosexual behavior and it could easily be tied to novel reproductive strategies (think of gay geese who collectively mate with a female and raise her eggs). Thus homosexuality would have repurcussions on the heterosexual sexual marketplace.
Secondly, if alternatives to the “Ward Cleaver” archetype undermine the negotiating power of other males, then you would expect a blanket response. You don’t let the camels nose into the tent and then draw a line in the sand. That is particularly true given that people do not choose their social norms on the basis of excel spreadsheets which calculate expected reproductive fitness, but on deeper prosocial instincts.
homosexuality exists for the same reason any trait exists that is disadvantageous to reproduction…
Exactly which traits, operating on 3 to 5% of the population, would those be?
“Exactly which traits, operating on 3 to 5% of the population, would those be?”
Well, let’s see, male pattern baldness? Birthmarks? ED? Asthma? Allergies? Lactose intolerance? Diabetes? Shortness? General unnattractiveness?
What is the cost of leading young people into a life style of disease, suffering, and early death?
I think terming “homophobia” all those who are anti-gay marriage is expanding the term excessively.
Those of us who don’t want our children to be homosexual, and do want them to be good husbands (especially), may oppose the new gay agenda because:
a) after gay-marriage becomes legal, there is a strong push to show “successful” happy gay couples, increasing the acceptance and practice of gay lifestyle. Show them in kids books, in media, etc.
b) There is already a claim that anybody who says practicing gay sex is sinful is engaging in hate speech — thus using the police to attack Christians.
c) Many young men have been approached by gay men politely asking for gay sex, and rejected them (or experimented); the demonization of gay pedophile priests hides that gov’t school teachers are about as likely to be similar sexual predators. Notice how “Catholic priest” is so much more publicized than “gay pedofile” in the sex scandals.
d) Much gay sex objectifies the sex object. Accepting this specific objectification, (like masturbation as well) seems to lead to more sex object sex, less love of the whole person relationships (though many husbands can stop the masturbation).
e) The elites, contrary to democratic processes, are pushing gay-marriage by judges ending laws that define marriage as between a man and a woman — this increases anger against elites, as well as against gays.
The pro-life folk who care about unborn babies but had elites declare abortion legal in non-democratic ways are similarly against this judicial elite decision making. Harvard keeping out ROTC is another “elites against normal America” issue.
The intolerance of the gay supporters against those against gay marriage is likely to be a current cause of some anti-gay backlash, now.
Significant social policy requires at least three generations to see results. The depopulation of Old Europe, which gay promiscuity / selfish sex / fewer children increasingly seems to be culture destroying.
“Demographics” is future history. Those with families, big families especially, will see their big family cultures as more successful in the future. The current gays leave too few offspring — and their attempts to recruit, especially among underage boy-men, is both illegal and increasing anger against gays.
Finally, on health, where are the statistics about new AIDS cases? How many non-infected have to be infected before it is logical to be against the practices that lead to infection? 1 000 000 in the last 5 years? 100 000? 10 000? 1 000?
This is a value question, but gay sex leads to more infection — I don’t think it legal for health insurance to charge gays more for AIDS insurance (but it should be, for almost all price discriminations).
I can’t imagine where you people work-
where I work being gay gives you a pass on just about everything-
any time it looks like there’s gonna be any disciplinary action on the horizon all my collegaues have to do is accuse their supervisor of homophobia and threaten to call GLAAD.
I’m in education and it’s well known that being gay means you can do what you want in the classroom with no danger.
I echo the points that Dolo made earlier, particularly the point about American Indian Societies. More specifically, In many North American Indian societies, people who displayed “gender atypical” characteristics were revered as “two spirit” people and often married people of the same biological sex (although not other two-spirit people — they would marry “normally” gendered ppl of the same sex).
Hostility to homosexuality is clearly NOT universal. Actually, I think that patriarchy is far more universal than homophobia. If we’re concerned about the “inevitable state of humanity” or whatnot, the feminist movement is on much more fragile grounds than the gay rights movement.
“Strong prejudices against gay men and women are found in every culture I know of, past or present.”
I’ve lived in Juchitan, Oaxaca (Mexico), where every mother would love to have a gay son (the word is “mux”, pronounced “moosh”.) Sure, there’s probably some covert prejudice there, just as there’s covert tolerance in oppressive societies. But I think that there’s no long-term tendency for Juchitan tolerance to disappear – certainly it’s been that way as long as there are records – and perhaps that’s because there’s a clearly-defined social role for gay men (the life of the party and their mother’s helper).
Homophobia is a term for a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards homosexuality and people identified or perceived as being homosexual. A male who has the abnormal gene on his X chromosome will have hemophilia.
I am not inclined to think that the biological component of homophobia is different from that behind racism or religious intolerance; xenophobia is strongly written into our bodies, but I think the definition of what constitutes ‘different’ and therefore worthy of hatred is socialized. As for the cyclic nature of acceptance of queer individuals, I think you could apply a periodic model to most -isms and find that it fits.
About the economics of queer oppression. The danger in queer identity is the contradiction it poses to the gender binary; if not all women have sex with men and not all men have sex with women, if not all women are born women and not all men are born men (et cetera; insert your divergence from the straight norm here), the basis of the patriarchy becomes shakier. It’s crucial to note that the core of homophobic violence against men is based on the perceived ‘feminine’ nature of male homosexuality, and, likewise, the core of homophobic violence against women is based on the perceived ‘masculine’ nature of female sexuality. Society would have us believe that ‘feminine’ men are a perversion and ‘masculine’ women a treason, attempts to overthrow and destroy. Homophobia has its roots in misogyny. And I don’t think one has to look far to find the economic basis for misogyny.
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