I’ve seen so many men terrified of anything gay themed. I’ve watched men refuse to be friends with people who didn’t act manly enough. I’ve watched grown-ass men bark “f@gg0+,” every time they saw 2 dudes expressing an interest in one another on TV. Pink Pony Club, I Kissed a Girl, and several other songs are a complete turn-off for them.
I have to ask, what scares you guys? What, sitting in the pit of your stomach, do you feel and think when you see gay things?
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Mean fear being treated they way they treat women
They are afraid of liking it.
I think that answer only carries so much weight: racists aren’t afraid of becoming black.
Probably more of a joke responce than anythint else.
Well, I mean. . . from the outside. . . It appears to create a ladder of self-worth, enabling someone to validate themselves above others for appearing not to conform to the group. While also ensuring your own compliance, by allowing the ladder to collapse in under you.
Edit: The question is, what are they complying with?
i doubt you’ll get a meaningful response from those you’re asking. this platform, lemmy, is in particular not going to expose your question to people like you described. ask it on the big platforms, you’ll get a much wider range and within that, an insanely wide range of bs. but as is obvious, it’s cultural and educational
OP probably wouldn’t get a meaningful answer in other places either. The kind of guy that reacts to gay men the way described isn’t going to reflect on why they’re scared of homosexuality and come back with anything useful; they’ll just say “I ain’t scared of no bummers!” and then call them a another slur.
fucking weirdass also i am introuble
Fr
This is the wrong question. You don’t know about sociology’s reason and it makes sense you would ask this. I’m not going to explain further than wrong question and figure out sociology’s answer because anything LGBTQ is a rabbit hole.
Then you just wasted your time and everyone else’s.
Yeah I wouldn’t expect people to know shit about what they want to talk about anyways if it needs critical thinking skills.
Why is it wrong and what would be the right one?
Its ignorant of sociological principles. What OP sees as “fear” is the complete opposite in sociology and reality. Its similar to how a whole bunch of people in Germany became Nazi supporter. They weren’t born to be Nazis. Same as these people weren’t born to be afraid of homosexuality. Its ignorant and the wrong question to be asking. The right question is what brings this consistent ideology or theme. What makes it popular enough that enough people decide to participate in it that op finds this pattern and asks it online.
Tbh, i don’t think the question was meant to get an academically rigorous answer. It seems more like a complaint (just look at the rest of the post). Maybe that’s why OP said “fear” a bit loosely, or maybe they don’t realize that “phobia” (which is really what this is about—homophobia) can also mean repulsion. Either way, wouldn’t it be better to interpret it in the best light and explain what you were aiming for—the sociological causes?
Not if you’re asking a question two steps away from answering yourself anyways. This is why sociology should be a requirement. If I go down that rabbit hole like I said it would be way too long. If it missed the point of the argument then why even bother giving them any explanation. It’s not a fear of homophobia is why it’s the wrong question.
For some reason i didn’t read this part of your earlier response:
The right question is what brings this consistent ideology or theme. What makes it popular enough that enough people decide to participate in it that op finds this pattern and asks it online
Now i can put the pieces together and have a rough idea where you’re going with this.
Anyway, let me insist that you’re asking something from the OP that it wasn’t trying to give in the first place. Your approach is academic, the OP’s is emotional.
OP is trying to solve a question that is the wrong approach altogether. Academic or emotional if you’re not going the right way it’s a pointless discussion.
I understand you think it’s wrong, but that’s because you’re looking at this through a different lens.
Here’s what i take from it:
I don’t like seeing people behave this way in these circumstances; i really don’t understand it. Lets talk about what you people feel in those same circumstances.
In casual communicative contexts, phrasing something as a question doesn’t necessarily mean it’s seeking an answer or at least not one that solves a problem. So, this can’t be a pointless discussion, because it isn’t a discussion at all, and certainly not an academic one. It’s people sharing experiences, just a conversation. it’s great you want more rigor, but asking for it here as if it were obvious misses the point: this wasn’t a context that demanded rigor from the start.
The “I find it fucking disgusting, bro!” fraction probably isn’t here. Or if they are, they are probably smart enough not to walk into this wood chipper.
There is a strong correlation between shame people feel for having tried it before or for not being able to admit to themselves that they feel this way and then how loud they get. Pair that with religiosity or just a very conservative environment and upbringing and you get the aforementioned bros. It’s more about how they feel, how insecure they are, than about anything physically off-putting. And as somebody who once reacted poorly to being hit on by a lovely Aussie, I think it’s also the somewhat unexpected element of it. We are pattern recognisers. Heterosexual is the majority. We can easily get freaked out by something that’s different. And a lot of the LGBTQ+ folks are still not living their romance in public (if there is some and they also want to) because they avoid wood chippers society has an unfortunately abundant supply of for them.
yeah, excuse me while i say, yeah
Older kids taught us to point out people that were different. Often with slurs. Not everyone grew out of it.
I’ll do my best. I can vaguely remember some of the words that came out of my mouth when I was around 13-18 years old. Most of which were slurs rather than deep thoughts.
The slurs were more to do with what was typical/acceptable talk at the time (late 90s-early 2000s) in combination with teenage boys love nothing more than being assholes to each other (typically to my straight friends) because they think it’s funny.
Some of my “deeper thoughts”, for as well as a teenager can articulate, were to do with not understanding and frankly not actually trying to understand any other perspective. I believe I was simply trying to boost myself by stepping on others. I don’t think there was ever a point in which I hated gay people, but I do remember saying how I thought it was disgusting (gay sexual acts)and I had opinions on gay couples raising children even though I had no evidence to support those opinions.
I don’t think any of it ever scared me, none of what I said was out of fear. I was never worried about liking it, as some other comments suggested. Instead, It was an easy way to safely feel superior to cope with my lengthy list of insecurities.
As my brain began to mature, my thoughts quickly changed.
So… Immaturity, insecurity, ignorance.
Nowadays… regret. Sorry everyone.
I’m glad you grew out of it. Too many boys never do
You seem to be a similar age to me, so have a similar response to my own.
But to add to your answer; for me in my younger years, it was primarily the fear of being othered by my peers. Being gay was seen as the worst thing a man could be, ergo, being seen as gay by my peers would have been the worst thing. So I’d overcorrect with homophobia.
In our defence (my peers and I, I mean), we were also in the midst of the AIDS crisis, where the news would keep bringing us stories of how many gay men were dying because they were having sex with each other. That’s legitimately scary when you’re young, just beginning to understand what sex is, and that you like the idea of it.
But in the interim I’ve grown up and moved into a mental space where I’m less of a prick.
For the past couple of years I’ve marched in the two pride marches local to me as a fully paid up supported of the LGBTQ+ community, not least because these days I don’t really consider myself to be straight anyway. I’m just a bloke-shaped person who likes to experience sex with other people, regardless of their junk.
Well, you’re gonna have trouble finding many men here that are genuinely “afraid” if homosexuality. Those that exist are unlikely to respond because it’s painting a giant target on themselves.
So, you’ll likely have to settle for second and third hand answers.
With that caveat in mind, I grew up in the south where the kind of homophobia that isn’t necessarily bigotry (though it usually is) sometimes gets discussed if you approach people right.
The general answers I ever got amounted to social approbation. They’re not so much scared of gay people, or gay acts, and almost universally not of “turning gay”. It’s that they have this idea that behind anything other than anti gay gets them tarred and feathered with the same brush.
Yeah, the other reasons exist, but it really does come down to being scared of sharing the same fate as gay people if they don’t object enough. And it is an actual fear, rather than hatred, it just shares the same external trappings. And, for most of the people that have that fear, they would rather share the label of bigot than the label of gay.
But make no mistake, it isn’t common. The kind of yelling-at-the-screen shit is just as performative, but it’s the flip side of the fear. Those assholes believe that they seem more manly by doing so. It’s territorial pissing and chest thumping.
It’s one of the reasons I dislike phobia being the suffix for forms of bigotry. While phobos, and thus phobia has relation to rejection of things, it’s a misnomer to say that most bigots are really acting out of fear. Which is dangerous, possibly even more dangerous than regular hate. But also not as dangerous as blind hatred paired with dehumanization of a target. The mental processes involved in bigotry are far more insidious than simple ignorance and fear of the unfamiliar.
Which is tangential, but I think worth examining.
I actually think it’s hyper-competitive bullshit.
For simple, stupid men especially, they see everything as a status contest, and for that worldview to work there must be clear ways to measure who is doing better than someone else, so they know where to rank with others.
But that system breaks down if you don’t value the same things they do the same WAY they do. This is also why these same people have the same visceral aversion to things like small cars, simple foods, etc, etc. “I can’t make you feel like I’m better than you with my truck if you don’t want a truck. There’s something wrong with you.”
This also explains why they look up to and lick the boots of people higher on the social ladder by their strict measure of what that means. It also explains why they view partners as prizes and not people.
And anyone who steps outside their ranking system is an anomaly that might, God forbid, make them have to reexamine some aspect of their value system, and that won’t fly.
For whatever the opinion of one random on the internet counts for, I think this nailed it.
I suspect it is somewhat similar of women looking at each other and judging each other about "giving out free milk. Biggest slut shamers are women, tho men are right after them lol.
So from a purely guessing point of view:
Place in society, and perceived safety of norm enforcement and the fact, that historically being gay was (almost/mostly) a death sentence.
Raising yourself up by hating someone else “at least I am not XYZ” or “it would suck to be XYZ I’m so much better” is an easy copium.
And distraction also: if you hate someone else, you won’t have time to hate yourself.
I’ve heard the argument before that it’s tied up in misogyny, homophobic men are, consciously or otherwise, thinking basically “I’m afraid gay men will treat me the way I treat women”
Hence all the anti-gay jokes like “backs against the wall lads” (note how the straight men are often imagining themselves as the bottom) - implication being, “I don’t respect consent therefore what if the gay man who’s more of a threat to me physically doesn’t either”
No idea how accurate this is but it certainly rings true for some behaviours
Drop soap in the shower is another one.
I don’t believe that they are scared but jealous.
Probably got raised in a way that they couldn’t express themselves so the first thing is to put others down who have the strength to express themselves.
Straight men who fear homosexuality are afraid of discovering that they secretly like the cock.
Hetero cis male here. I’ve always personally felt that the stereotypical male macho reaction to homosexuality is pretty odd. But I have a lot of gay people in my friends and family, and was around homosexuality a little more than some people were growing up.
If I had to infuse anything into the mind of someone scared or worried about gay people, it would just be that outside of that one detail, and their own small subculture they’ve embraced, they’re just people, the same as anyone else.
To me it feels similar to fear-driven bigotry based on racism. Outside of a little melanin (or lack thereof) and a slightly different subculture, other “races” are people, just the same as you. But rather than get to know other, some folks find it easier to be scared and ignorant and shield themselves behind hate.
Exactly this, we all eat and poop and sleep and seek comfort and acceptance. People are the same at a basic level.
I’m scared of appearing to be gay, because i went to school in the 90s. Being gay was the worst thing you could possibly be. If there was any evidence that could potentially point towards you being gay (wearing anything remotely pink. Accidentally listening to a girl band. Getting an ear pierced was trendy but one of the ears meant you’re gay. The pitfalls are endless.)
I want to clarify that I enjoy seeing gay people. It feels like a little victory for mankind. This is a very learned fear. If you’ve never had your ass kicked my multiple people, all of whom could beat you 1v1 anyway, its hard to explain, it gets deeply instilled in you. I know I shouldn’t touch fire. I know I shouldn’t fall from a height. I know I shouldn’t be seen to be possibly gay.
“Haha look at his purple shirt! GAYYY!!!”
Common quote from a guy I used to know
