No Straight Man is Actually Homophobic
Homophobia is a misnomer. Straight men don’t fear gay people—they fear a deeper truth that the very existence of gay men makes them unable to ignore (and it doesn’t have anything at all to do with being gay).
Men are taught that the entire value of our identity is based on two fundamental power dynamics: conquering the world (money, resources, achievement etc) and conquering women (many wife-servants ready to give as much sex as we want). And to be fair, conquering the world is really just a means to assist in conquering women. Other men are viewed as either our allies or our competition in our conquests. Welcome to the game of Patriarchy.
Out of all the power men allegedly have, we’re conditioned to believe we do not have the power to choose any other game. And that’s where it gets interesting. The existence of gay men immediately proves that there are in fact other options or games. And since options are a function of power, it makes straight men aware that maybe they aren’t as powerful as they were taught—that their entire worldview is based on a lie.
To be clear, I am not at all saying that straight men can choose to be gay (though more people would be honest with and about themselves), what I am saying is this: learning they don’t have to conquer women means there are other ways to relate to them.
If my life is based on a lie, and I accept the truth, everything built upon that lie must crumble, including the identity I created from it and the feedback loops that support it. The false self (aka ego) must die in order for us to live in reality. But we are not always ready to accept the truth that encounters us…processing the cognitive dissonance in a healthy way requires a level of emotional intelligence most men don’t have access to.
Speaking of egos, the purpose of the ego is psychological protection from the things we fear. Men tend to have bigger egos because we’ve literally taught them to fear their own emotions and not have empathy for themselves or others. The primary emotion validated in boys is anger: we can’t be sad or scared but we can fight. This improves our narcissistic/sociopathic ability to conquer others because conquering requires us to suppress any empathy we have toward who we intend to conquer.
(Sidenote: Narcissists are not born, they’re made. Narcissism isn’t a personality trait; it’s a coping mechanism for deep insecurity. The more we condition people to suppress their emotions, the more narcissists we create in our society. And let’s not forget: Most crime is committed by men because suppression is not an effective way to regulate emotions.)
The immature ego will seek to protect itself by k*lling anything that threatens it. This is why hate crimes exist. It’s not because they’re gay, it’s because they show how powerless you really are in a system that has taken advantage of you from the time you were born. A system that has traumatized you into traumatizing others for sport. And if you let gay people exist, you have to accept that you’ve been a pawn of the system the whole time. A nonplayable character if you will.
Real empathy always produces equity, so empathy in men would automatically dismantle patriarchy as it disintegrates the illusion of separation—homophobia and misogyny are just symptoms of the same problem. Which brings us back to the point of this post: no straight man is actually homophobic, he is simply afraid of the truth that he’s just as “powerless” as the women he’s been taking advantage of.
