Natural Allies

[Trigger warning.]

For a long time, I've been meaning to write another post on the subject of women and gay men being natural allies, with the intent of drawing a line between the caricatures of the Gay Predator and the Female Rape Victim Who Was Totally Asking For It. We operate on different sides of the consent equation, but we are both demonized via lies told about consent. For gay men, the lie is that they don't seek consent. For women, the lie is that consent is an implicit constant, by virtue of our bodies being public property.

(Keen observers will already have noted that both mendacious narratives are spawned of projection, arising from the ugliest manifestation of straight male sexuality, which itself is predatory in nature and has no respect for consent, having intractably objectified women into beings whose value is wholly contingent upon the provision of sex.)

So, yeah, I've been intending to talk about this, and then comes this story about the zombie corpse of the "Gay Panic" defense stumbling through yet another American courtroom, which perfectly (and depressingly) encapsulates the entire clusterfuck of a relationship between narratives about predatory gays and sexual assault.

In opening statements Monday, defense lawyer Michael Aed told the jury of five women and seven men that the case "is not a whodunit."

Aed said [defendant Fernando Limon] will testify that he killed [Jorge Perez] in self-defense. The reason: Perez, a homosexual, molested Limon, who is not gay.

And not a woman—ergo, since masculinity is inevitably defined in contradistinction to femininity, he is not presumed to have given consent. All the easier to believe because his supposed rapist and actual victim was gay, and thus presumed to have a predatory sexuality.

And, in another swell little marriage between projection and the reliance on contradistinctive definitions of manhood, the straight man who invents a sexual assault out of whole cloth benefits from the overwhelming narrative that it is women who routinely make false rape claims in desperate bids of self-preservation (or vengeance). Wonder not why that pervasive accusation against women exists; it exists for the same reason narratives about predatory gays does—because the patriarchal male who is treated since birth as The Norm (from whom all Others deviate) imagines Others to have his motivations.

This (alleged) murderous scum, who prosecutors say killed Perez during the commission of a robbery, is relying on The Patriarchy's demonizing misconceptions about women and gay men in the same way millions of men before him—to scapegoat them and escape the fate he (allegedly) deserves.

We are natural allies, because we are natural targets of the same despicable reprobates.