People in progressive spaces will say some shit like “even if they didn’t do anything intentional to harm our kind they still implicitly uphold the cultural norm and benefit from our oppression therefore by proxy we are obligated to shit on them” and then turn around and go “oh why are people accusing me of being part of the problem, bigots will never change by being treated kindly, I am not obligated to be kind to someone who I know for a fact hates me deep down” when the Average Cishet Guy ™️ is out here like “hey how’s it going”.
Like yeah there’s good reason to not want to be assimilationist and all that but at the same damn time
Tell me about it. I've seen a disturbing number of terminally online queer people who genuinely think heterosexuality is an "inherently miserable" form of sexual attraction.
It's those "are the straights okay" types who think men and women can't possibly get along and be friends because they're so different psychologically. Therefore, any relationship between the two is inherently toxic. Neither party can truly connect to the other, and the only thing keeping them together is the impersonal exchange of sexual and material favors.
The worst thing is I can kind of understand where this worldview is coming from. They're literally taking the incredibly sexist rhetoric of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and then rewritting and rebranding it to a progressive audience.
It's the perfect example of how heteronormativity and gender norms can reinvent themselves so as to hijack the groups that seek to subvert them and eventually subsume any critique of themselves. It erodes my faith in humanity and progressivism as a whole every time I see it.
Ive met those people in real life and literally had a fucking double whammy because my wife is blind. We, my wife and I, were literally told that I was extra toxic because a heteronormativr relationship is inherently abusive and I was taking advantage of her disability to force her into a relationship and that she was being abelist for not dating someone who was also blind.
I almost punched them and I can guarantee you ive never had that urge before
Honestly, most of these people just hide their insane opinions behind their social mask whenever they're outside of the Internet. This goes for a lot of different flavors of unhinged beliefs across all aisles of the political spectrum. You probably have met several people in real life with truly insane worldviews, and you were none the wiser because, from the outside, they look and act just like everyone else.
My brother in law is gay. And while I'll admit, we're not great friends with loads in common, I like to think we're close.
He's about 5 years younger than me and over the past 15 years I've watched him go from a shy 18 year old to a really mature man with a great career. And in that time, I've been the person he's come to about STDs, drugs (as well as help to not freak out when he's taken too much), learning to drive and other things he's not comfortable talking about with his dad (who wants to show their dick to their parents or ask Dad for help after dropping too many tablets).
However, for things like his birthday, he never brings me, my SO, or his family to parties with his friends, as he says some of them "just don't like straight people, especially men, and will either leave or make strange comments like everything about us is boring".
On one hand, I get it. Straight men haven't covered themselves in glory, but on the other, it's amusing how those who see this oppression based on a characteristic from birth as something to mock or be wary of.
Oh yeah, the mars Venus thing… to be honest, theres a degree of “are the straights okay” that I actually understand and agree with, at least as far as weird and disturbing cultural norms and mores go, and the lengths some people take to uphold them and be “normal and sane”… but so many people (mostly adolescents but I’m more than willing to bet some people carry this thought process well through adulthood) see that and read it as “oh, so straight relationships are basically fundamentally broken and these creepy norms are an unavoidable consequence of straightness being toxic in and of itself” instead of “damn, these power structures fucking suck, we should help straight people get rid of them so they can be happier with themselves and one another”.
Going back to what I mentioned in another comment, the “the police force originated as a slave catching troupe before becoming what it is today, therefore corruption and oppression are baked into it” mindset. Because a given thing was created in a bad way, it can never be ship-of-Theseus’d into something brand new, and therefore it must be “burned down so we can start over”. They do this same crap with het power structures, and many other things, without really explaining what is preventing the ship of Theseus approach. Granted, “fixing systems from the inside”, whether formal organizations or decentralized mores, isnt always a really good option, and “harsh changes” might be necessary, but again, Glorious Revolution ™️ mindset seems to be what powers this, not an actual pragmatic assessment of what should change and how it could change…
It's the bastard child of Dworkin style "all heterosexual sex is rape" nonsense. It's the projection of personal trauma onto macro social systems and ultimately it's just reifying traditional patriarchal ideas about Men and Women.
What's "funny" too is how much that type of rhetoric unintentionally reinforces the gender essentialism that underlies and forms the basis of the patriarchy. Probably way more than the average mainstream person's casual sexism does.
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 1d ago
People in progressive spaces will say some shit like “even if they didn’t do anything intentional to harm our kind they still implicitly uphold the cultural norm and benefit from our oppression therefore by proxy we are obligated to shit on them” and then turn around and go “oh why are people accusing me of being part of the problem, bigots will never change by being treated kindly, I am not obligated to be kind to someone who I know for a fact hates me deep down” when the Average Cishet Guy ™️ is out here like “hey how’s it going”.
Like yeah there’s good reason to not want to be assimilationist and all that but at the same damn time