Religious Right bootstomper Carol Swain is quite upset about that dreaded gay thing. Specifically, her life is just being ruined, ruined I say, because some people might think she and a friend might be gay, oh no! I can’t even work up a response to this. Who the fuck cares? I’d assume people who actually know her know that she’s a bigoted piece of goods, along with her being hetero or whatever. Why would she care if strangers might have a random, passing thought about her? Not that I expect that happens much.
Last week, Religious Right activist and college professor Carol Swain spoke at the Family Research Council about her latest book, “Abduction: How Liberalism Steals Our Children’s Hearts and Minds,” where she complained that she cannot even go out in public with her female friends without worrying that people might think that they are gay.
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Even now, as an adult, Swain complained that when she goes out in public with her female friends, “we have to wonder, do people think we’re gay?”
“We don’t care,” she said, “but just the fact that we live in a culture where you can’t have close relationships between men and women with women without wondering whether someone is going to think there is more to it, that is not the way society is supposed to operate.”
Oh yes, you do care. You care very much. After all, you have to have something to keep the edge of your unspeakable bigotry nice and sharp. You have to find yet another way to try and get small minded people panicky, so they’ll fork over money…to you. Convenient, that. I’m happily and visibly bisexual, and I don’t care if people think I’m hetero, nor do I care if they think I’m gay. Haven’t you heard, Carol? Love, it makes the world go ’round. You should try it sometime. Go ahead, go out with a friend, and hold her hand! It feels nice, especially when you don’t care what people think.
In Ms. Swain’s book, she opines about how when she was a little girl, she never had any thoughts about whether or not she might marry her best friend, and thinks openness and acceptance are just fucking everything up. That’s not the case, Ms. Swain. You didn’t think about marrying your best friend because she was a girl, and you were hetero. Other girls had a boy for a best friend, and if they were hetero, they may well have thought about marrying their best friend. Other girls thought about marrying their best girlfriend because they were not hetero. And so on. Y’see, everyone isn’t hetero, and you don’t get to use your personal experience to extrapolate a justification for oppression, bigotry and hatred.
Via RWW.
Thinking that everyone else in the world is thinking about you, that you are just so freaking important that of COURSE everyone is thinking about you and wondering about you, is simply another amazingly arrogant assumption.
Sorry, lady. No one cares. When they see you on the street with your friends, they ignore you and continue to think about themselves. You’re simply not so important that everyone is thinking about you.
Yeah, the arrogance is stunning. But y’know, if one person, just one person on the whole planet has a fleeting thought of “nice couple” or something, by god, the whole fucking world will collapse. Yep.
I think there is a tendency to think that others think the same way we do.
When Swain goes out and about she obviously spends all her time estimating and imagining and evaluating the sexual habits of everyone she sees, so she assumes eveyone else is doing that, too.
And then she gets home and says, “
GoddamitGosh darn it, I forgot to buy milk!”..what the fuck happened to grammar?
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Back when my BFF and I were looking for a flat together half the landlords and ladies thought we were a couple and were kind of confused when we said we needed three rooms and that the way to the bathroom mustn’t be through one of them (because no matter how much you love your BFF, you don’t want them to move through your bedroom when they need to pee at night…
Fun fact: we survived. With our heterosexuality mostly intact. But it was a good was to chase Jehova’s Witnesses down the stairs.
For a college professor, she’s not overly keen on societal histories, either. Way back when, men were openly emotional and extremely close to other men, that was considered to be normal and typical. Pretty sure most people had better things to do than concern themselves with “wow, wonder if the good Sirs Jones and Smith have a thing going.”
There are a lot of old B&W czech movies from the 1930ies where two bachelors share an appartment. Judging by the ammount of movies with this in it, it was apparently normal for single men to do.
In the movies of course one of them gets married, or finds a child from old relationship or something like that (homosexuality was not only taboo, but also a crime at that time). But two bachelors living together? In itself nothing to raise an eybrow about.
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I had on my blog one homophobe to completely freak out about gay pride and trotting the old cannard that children should not be exposed to gay couples being affectionate to each other in public because they would not like it and that grown-ups do not like looking at them either so they should have the decency not to be gay in public.
At that time I was still trying to reason with such people, so I pointed out two things:
-People are not generally enthused about public displays of affection, even between heterosexual couples.
-Gay couples are not in this regard any different from heterosexual couples. Appart from sometimes holding hands or occasional kiss there won’t be much to be seen in public, even on gay pride parade.
-His children would not share his prejudices if he did not teach them to.
All arguments were summarily dismissed. Unsurprisingly he went on to spit bile on my blog until I banned him out of exasperation with his dishonesty.
No need to travel in time*, space is enough. I was always struck by how tenderly my male Syrian students cared for each other, how much emotional and physical comfort they provided for each other.
Of course there’s an element of heteronormativity to this: If nobody thinks that “gay” is even possible then your heterosexuality is not under threat by giving another dude a kiss.
*I’m currently preparing “Hamilton” for my 12th grade. People are still not sure whether Hamilton and Lawrence hitched off or were just “affectionate” dudes as it was common during their time…