they have found a way to eliminate male aggression. The male is to be socially transformed. He is to be turned into a non-hostile, uncompetitive type. There is an obstacle: any realistic account of gender differences which denies the male competitive world denies the nature of men. Does that bother the social reformers? Not at all. What cannot be changed can be swept under the carpet. It is to this end that the male is found by the liberal arts academics to be a social, cultural construct – open to deep transformation. Only sexual orientation does not wash away in the communal bath; human nature is not biodissolvable.
‘Nothing is transmitted but the social?’ asks Anne.
‘It’s in the vested interest of the social sciences to find all things socially transmitted,’ Bill answers.
‘You mean,’ Anne asks, ‘that if we transform man’s social world then we transform him?’
‘Those who believe in the perfectibility of man do not want to know about the masculine as natural.’
‘There’s evidence to support the social hypothesis…’
‘… but only if you don’t look beyond the external.’
Scholars are no longer allowed to imply that heterosexuality is the norm for sexual attraction. In the standard US handbook for avoiding bias in language (Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses, 1995) we are not to talk of husband, wife, spouse or marriage. We are asked to substitute gender neutral terms like domestic companion, longtime partner or primary relationship. Language is freighted with splendid deceits, and to impose rules of thumb as to what can (cannot) be said is to put one’s finger on the point of a tack. To the average male the language of the thought police is disparaging, offensive and prejudicial. There is fear and loathing in the new sexism: it is both anti-sex and anti-male.
The male is pre-judged – as prejudiced. Here is the belief that all should conform to the bisexual ideal: a social idyll in which sexual differences are eliminated. He is wrong-footed at the starting line. He is accused of homophobia. But what of heterophobia? What if it is not the average male who is prejudiced but all those who assume that straight is potentially bent – unisexual, bisexual, part-one-part-another, desexed, androgynous, queer, both/and, homosexual, crossing over, in between.
‘The word police will get you.’
‘The charge?’ asks Anne.
‘Heterosexism.’
‘Because we say that the heterosexual male is normal? Or the norm?’
‘To be born Chinese is the norm in China.’
‘A gay might stand out as abnormal.’
‘My green eyes might stand out in Mongolia,’ says Bill. ‘Would that be queer? You know I’m no more likely to change my sexual orientation than the colour of my eyes.’
‘Lots of people think everyone’s a bit unisex.’
‘Like being a bit pregnant?
“‘DELETE, DELETE, DELETE,” say the word police. We are all potentially bisexual.’
‘One in a hundred, more like,’ says Anne. ‘Those who include speak only for themselves.’
If women, the argument goes, are given the same opportunities as men, and are not restrained by the dead hand of ‘old boy networks’, then they can achieve all that a man can achieve. It is hard to argue against that well-meaning assertion, even though a dangerous and unscientific assumption lies behind it: that men and women are the same.
Perhaps the most extreme and obvious example of this assumption is seen in America where, in the last few years, lawyers have forced the hitherto male-dominated military to open all its doors to women. The result has been legal equality and constant trouble. The men are consistently accused of insensitivity or, worse, of sexual harassment – and it does not take much for a serviceman to be accused of that most heinous crime. Indeed, according to guidelines laid down by the Pentagon, if a soldier merely looks at one of his female colleagues for more than three seconds then he is harassing her. The US Navy even closed itself down for a whole day so that its men could be lectured on the evils of sexual harassment. The whole experiment, which rushes on with the inevitability of the Gadarene swine nearing the precipice, can be simply summarized: women demand equal opportunity, gain it, then complain that the men behave badly. ‘Sensitivity training’, or even disciplinary action, then follows to change the men’s behaviour to make them gentler; in fact, to make them more like women. It would be easier, surely, to recruit only women?
The homosexual lobby is as eager as some women to blur gender identities. It is axiomatic among many gay lobbyists that everyone’s sexuality is a mix of male and female, and that where any one person ends up on the sliding scale depends solely on social pressures and influences. Homosexuality, they tell us, is a convenient social label, no more ‘real’ than heterosexuality. Ten years ago a conference devoted its entire agenda to just that assertion. One of the conference’s published conclusions was that ‘homosexuality is not inherent in an individual but constructed’.1 No wonder such people believe that a little social pressure will shift all the old, crude, uncomfortably macho males along the continuum to a place where they will be subtly feminized and so become less threatening. Violence against women and gays would drop dramatically, and no one will deny that this would be a desirable outcome. Men’s violence against women is well documented; perhaps less well known is the growing intolerance shown by heterosexual males for gays, an intolerance that has certainly led to a dramatic increase in assaults on homosexuals by ‘straight’ men.2
The growing incidence of anti-gay violence is even adduced as further evidence for our bisexuality. A Dutch study of anti-gay violence noted that the victims were usually ‘the least manly’ in appearance.3 Without citing evidence (no questions were directed to the attackers) the study solemnly reported that ‘it was presumed that [the attackers] victimised this group of men … because they themselves were homosexual and could stamp out the fire within them by the use of violence against “obvious gays”.’ So straight men attack gays because they are really gay themselves? Freud and his followers have much to answer for in this tortuous reasoning. Not one to cling to a single fallacy when he could hold two, Freud asserted that men were partly women (they have nipples, don’t they?) and that they repressed their ‘natural bisexuality’. That notion has given intellectual respectability to the claim that we all have the ever-present possibility of being gay or straight.
To be anti-gay is thus explained as a reaction to the male’s fear of his own latent homosexuality, an explanation that is supported by the word used to describe such prejudice, homophobia, which means ‘fear of sameness’. ‘People are homophobic because they fear their own latent homosexuality, or because they are insecure in their own masculinity. This answer represents one of the most popular “common sense” explanations for homophobia. It is a theory that guides our practice.’4 Homophobia, another learned journal says, ‘reflects three assumptions; that anti-gay prejudice is primarily a fear response; that it is irrational and dysfunctional for individuals that manifest it; that it is primarily an “individual aberration” rather than a reflection of cultural values.’5 This is now received wisdom. In every straight man there is a gay screaming to be let out.
‘The heterosexual norm is taken as Enemy Number One,’ says Anne.
‘Mere heterophobia,’ says Bill.
Collins’ dictionary defines homophobia as: ‘intense hatred or fear of homosexuals or homosexuality’. Thus to use the word ‘homophobia’ is to imply that the aversion that most straight males feel towards gays is a psychological disorder. The word is a description of the extreme – ‘intense fear’ and ‘hatred’ – and to employ it as a description of the average male’s reaction to homosexuality is absurd. His feelings are not of hatred, but of aversion. The aversion might include an element of disgust, but never of fear. Nor is it a psychological disorder, rather it is the normal straight male’s