"Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard." - Daphne du Maurier

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Heterophobia

"The basic problem I had with what the author wrote was that she seems to have a chip on her shoulder regarding heterosexuals in particular, and the establishment in general. E.g. "I'm in love with a breeder. Well, FUCK." It doesn't automatically follow that all heterosexuals will have children, and that term (breeders) strikes me as pejorative, comparing humans to cattle. Similarly, the repeated references to "The Man" emphasise a "them and us" mentality (and possibly also a 1970s mentality). Then she compares a bar being raided by the police to an attack by skinheads. My view is that if the police are doing a raid, i.e. they believe that a crime is being (or has been) committed, then the best approach is to co-operate with them and be polite, rather than to "join your acquaintance in taunting and otherwise harassing the moron at hand". This may be suggesting that a bunch of redneck police officers will say "Hey, let's go beat us up some faggots", but how often does that actually happen? Given the amount of litigation in America, I assume that such an event would have led to a court case, so there would be evidence to support this (such as a newspaper report). In all my own dealings with the police (both when I've reported a crime to them, and when they've caught me doing something wrong), I've found that if I behave reasonably then so do they.

However, the sentence that bothered me the most was "You see, by virtue of your heterosexuality, you are the oppressor". As I interpret that (and please do correct me if I'm wrong), she is saying that regardless of my actions or inactions, I am oppressing people simply by existing. This comes back to the "them and us" attitude - it sounds like "homosexuals and heterosexuals can't live in harmony, so the only way for homosexuals to be free is for all heterosexuals to die". The most charitable response I can think of is to dismiss these opinions as comic relief ("Help! Help! I'm being oppressed! Violence inherent in the system! Violence inherent in the system!" - Dennis, Monty Python and the Holy Grail), which I'm sure isn't the desired effect. To digress slightly, this reminds me of X-Men 2, where mutancy is a fairly blatant metaphor for homosexuality; using that metaphor, I think the writer comes across as being more like Magneto than Professor Xavier. If this is truly what she believes, then she is entitled to her opinion, but it seems just as bigoted as homophobia to me, so it's certainly not going to make her other comments any more persuasive. Hence the title of this web page."


This encapsulates a lot of my grouses about PC/left wing hysteria.