It’s tough to get me excited about anything gay these days. What was once a fearless, exciting subculture has ossified into a load of uptight house husbands with terrible taste in everything who won’t even deign to share their superior homosexual man-fluid for the good of the species.
But I can glimpse something on the horizon that might just make it interesting again to be a fag: feminists are about to declare war on us. Specifically, the unfuckable feminist fag hags who have for so long ridden on our tastefully embroidered coat-tails. They’re going to lose.
In my recent appearance on the Rubin Report, I suggested that gays would soon break with the mainstream political Left. We’re natural experimenters who have always pushed the boundaries of acceptable speech, ideas and behaviour. The rift between feminism and homosexuals is just one front in the coming minority wars, which have been created and will be sustained by progressive identity politics.
While the Left may have been fair-weather friends while gays fought against people who wanted them locked up, there’s always been a latent tension between our waspish, free-wheeling culture and left-wing politics, with its suffocating language codes and privilege hierarchies that make eighteenth-century etiquette guides look like Mr Men books.
On one level, I’m relaxed about the lunatic excesses of modern feminism if only because it seems to be driving so many men into the arms of other men. More for me! Modern men are so utterly sick of the grievance-mongering and victimhood culture from the supposedly fairer sex they’ve all started sucking dicks, though you have to read between the lines of the progressive coverage to know it. Put a man in prison and he’ll take a blow job from another man to let off steam. Put him in a room full of feminists and… he’ll stick with the dude.
But I do also see a disturbing trend of hectoring and attempts to control our lifestyles, both of which need to be slapped down hard. It turns out that people with no lives of their own have very strong opinions on how others should live theirs. And that straight women actually think they have it harder than gay men. Obviously, both of these things are baffling and laughable.
Gay men have not, historically, given enough of a shit to bother critiquing feminism. We have no dog in the fight and you have no sexual power over us whatsoever. Quite the opposite, because eww. In fact, from our point of view, the only dog is you. We don’t want to bang you no matter how assiduously you jam your fingers down your throats. But we were at least prepared to hold your hair up for you while you sputtered and retched – right up until you started this latest nonsense.
If you ladies want a fight, well, you can consider this column the start of a new era in minority relations. Women might have started it, but, as ever, we’ll finish it off for you. Let the sass wars commence.
You can already see schisms developing between lesbians and the transgendered, who by and large go along with the excesses of modern feminism, and gay men and drag queens, who do not. These internecine quarrels probably won’t spill over into the mainstream and become public bitch-fights, but the brewing war between homos and man-haters almost certainly will.
I’m speaking mostly for gay men in what follows, because lesbians bore me, don’t really exist anyway and in any case have always received hugely disproportionate critical and media attention.
As aberrations from the norm, gays have license to experiment in a way that the rest of society doesn’t. Often, that can lead to greatness. (At the very least, some really fucking amazing parties.) Gays are vastly over-represented in the ranks of inventors, politicians and artists and the ferocious and hysterical drag queen scene is another example of our lack of respect for conventional boundaries.
Popular YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, whose show I commend to you as an oasis of common sense and from whose research I lifted many of the links in this column, recently produced a video charting a phenomenon which I’ve been eagerly following for some time: the rise of the anti-gay feminist. Having noticed our penchant for rebelliousness and our anti-authoritarian streak, feminists have finally realised that male gays may be a bigger problem for them than the male gaze. So they’ve begun trying to convince the world that “homosexual misogyny” is a thing.
“So many of us are only familiar with the idea of male privilege being the province of straight men that we discount how gay men are able to exert dominance and control over women.” (Rohin Guha, writing in Jezebel)
Feminism’s growing distaste for gay men has been apparent for some time. In 2010, Rose McGowan went on a long rant against one of Britain’s most prominent gay celebrities, Stephen Fry. Accusing male homosexuals of failing to “extend a hand to women,” the actress said: “Gay men are as misogynistic as straight men, if not more so.” British feminist Laurie Penny similarly accused Fry of failing to show “solidarity in the face of a heteronormative patriarchy that oppresses us all.”
Penny has it wrong. What we call “feminism” is really just women furious that men want to rut with more attractive women, and in that world-view gay men are the crème de la crème of women-haters for eschewing girls altogether. But some of you probably find that suggestion offensive.
The storm of accusations against Fry came after he stated a fact: that women don’t have the same appetite for sex as men. It was a typically idiotic backlash against a man who had the audacity to state a fact about women in public. Fry and I don’t always see eye-to-eye but on that one he was right. But beyond the transient controversy, the charge that gay men are more misogynistic than straights is starting to stick, at least in batty far-Left circles.
I’ve seen this myself. I’ve lost count of the number of times a mad feminist has made the claim, often implicitly to avoid allegations of homophobia, that my attraction to men over women is somehow a sign of misogyny. Yeah, okay love, I think to myself. I’m such a woman-hater I actually started sleeping with men. This is how bonkers modern feminism can be.
Thinking about it… even if you’re right and I’m gay because women are awful, you’ve sort of proved my point for me, haven’t you?
Personally, I don’t mind if women start to believe that gay men are monsters who hate them. Anything that leads to fewer obnoxious bachelorette parties in our night-clubs can only be a good thing. But it’s worth briefly exploring the reasons feminists and gay men are set to become mortal enemies before I offer a few tips to troubled homosexuals to help them pre-empt the inevitable meltdowns with their Jezebel-reading feminist fag hags.
First, there are the feminists who want to police sexuality. Stephen Fry was right: women do have lower sex drives than men, and their radical political wing frequently lashes out at men who display a healthy level of sexual desire. This is the well-documented school of sex-negative feminism, which was pioneered by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon in the 1980s. It lives on today in Anita Sarkeesian’s crusade against sexy video games, and the non-stop feminist campaign against racy magazines and topless models in the UK.
Gay men, who have more sex than any other social group, are the polar opposites of sex-negative feminism. Despite our misguided attempts to ape straight couples by joining the institution of marriage, what we really want is to wake up in bed next to at least three hot immigrants every day of the week. There’s nothing sex-negative about gay men, and there never will be. Oh, and by the way: expressing a racial preference in our dating profiles is not racist. But thanks for setting that whole tolerance and acceptance thing back half a decade, feminism.
By the way, as for the “open letters” to “white gay men” about “appropriating black culture”? Park it, sweetheart. We’ve each had more black schlong in us than the Kardashian family, and we are not about to take lectures from blue-haired middle-class sex-repellants who last saw a black person when they rang downstairs for coffee — nor from the well-meaning half-wits they’ve managed to rope in on their behalf. You don’t see Beyoncé complaining about gay men imitating her dance moves.
Of course, to feminists, it’s more important to wag fingers about innocent behaviours and preferences than to remind spoilt western brats that being gay is still illegal in 75 countries, with the death penalty mandated in at least five. Last I checked, the number of countries in which being a woman was against the law was still zero.
I love the feminists who say gay people have women to thank for gay marriage, by the way. I know progressives are famous for their shallow grasp of history, but that one really does take the biscuit.
You can also stop asking if the preponderance of gay men in the fashion industry is “problematic,” thanks dears. You’re the ones who end up in our clothes, and let me tell you, you want gays running fashion houses if any of you ever want to have sex again. Go ahead. Try wearing an outfit with no gay input whatsoever anywhere in the design process.
Secondly, there are the feminists who want to police language. Increasingly-concerned academics like Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt are too polite to say it explicitly, but the “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” currently stifling intellectual inquiry on campus were pioneered by feminists.
More recently, the UN endorsed a brazen call for web censorship. Like much of the identitarian Left, feminists want to replace old etiquette rules with a new system of politically-driven language policing, controlled by them and predicated on nebulous hurt feelings and speculative “harm.” Having long overturned the hectoring, socially-conservative establishment, they now want to assume its place.
Gay men have always taken pleasure in scandalising polite society. Oscar Wilde is the perennial example: his work was condemned in the nineteenth century as “unclean, poisonous, and heavy with the odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” Where do I sign up?
Gay shock tactics don’t always produce pleasant results. Gay Pride festivals unfairly subject the rest of society to the uninhibited spectacle of the gay male id. But our natural propensity to horrify does at least make us the perfect opposition to modern feminism, a movement increasingly obsessed with protecting feelings at the expense of individual liberty and, often, merely telling the truth.
There’s a more obvious reason the homosexual-feminist alliance was doomed from the start. We love men, and feminists hate them. I don’t just mean physical attraction — though, yes, most of the most vocal intersectional third-wave feminists are lesbianic scolds. We also love masculinity. We don’t see it as “toxic”; we see it as beautiful, life-affirming, exciting and precious. Little wonder gays like me and Androphilia author Jack Donovan have led the charge to defend masculinity from its modern opponents.
Anyway, look. With all this in mind, I’ve decided it’s better to cut ties now and send the fembot fag hags packing. For too long, female fellow travellers have pretended to be our mates while secretly wondering if we were all misogynistic bastards. We were happy, for a time, to treat you like a kid brother, give you your first line of coke, shape your taste in music and clothes and try to make you presentable.
But it’s time for a divorce. You see, sadly for you feminazis, there was a prenup we forgot to tell you about, and feminists have a hell of a lot more to lose. So you can keep the Warhol prints you think make you “artistic” and “interesting”; we’ll keep the bachelor pad you could never afford in the Meatpacking District.
And you can hang on to your Starbucks gold card and continue to inhale cake for breakfast in what, without a gay BFF, will inevitably turn into a horrible downward spiral of calorific binges and self-loathing; we’ll keep the chef’s table at Gordon Ramsay and the gym membership. Cheer up, darlings! We made a go of it, but you simply aren’t worth further investment. We never asked to be foot-soldiers in your war on men, and we want no part in it.
You lost when you started a war with gamers, and you’re about to lose another one with queens. I don’t know which is more embarrassing for you.
Finally, to my fellow queers, here’s an instruction manual for shedding the drippy, needy, unbearable hangers-on for good. Just remember, girls: when the only man you can bag is a Nickelback-loving loser who smells your hair while you’re asleep and creeps your mom out, you can’t say you weren’t warned.
HERE IT IS, LADIES: THIS IS HOW GAY MEN ARE GOING TO TREAT YOU FROM NOW ON
1) When you look incredibly stupid or fat or basic and are about to go out in public, gay men will no longer hold you back. Sure bitch, blue hair goes with everything.
2) Feminists are uninvited to gay brunch. Yes, I know, you’ll have your own prosecco and canned orange juice “bottomless sad girl” night at the knitting circle, but I mean real gay brunch. We know the best places, we have the inexpensive yet high quality white wines you crave, and we have all the banter. Enjoy hearing a goony beard-man talk about how good he’s getting at acoustic guitar at the Village Inn.
3) All blow job lessons are cancelled. I’ve seen Mattress Girl’s porno and frankly I’m appalled. You needed the help. Not any more.
4) Do we have gossip? Of course not. At least, not as far as you’re concerned. To gossip would be, I dunno, patriarchy? And not in the interests of feminism. Sure, I know who’s pregnant, stoned, fucking a pig’s head, or James Delingpole’s secret… well, it wouldn’t interest you. Gossip is #Cyberviolence. *click*
5) You know who wants to hear about your break-ups? Somebody else. Well, that’s not true, I absolutely do, but I can work it out via your moody Facebook posts filled with songs that “totally like… explain the feels right now.” All free gay therapy is cut off. See if the vintage record store will pay for somebody else to listen to your nonsense. CUT. OFF.
6) Get your loud, obnoxious bachelorette parties out of my club. Yes, I know they tip. But I promise the gays scared off by these cringeworthy oldsters and their progressive penis party circle-jerking will be worth it. They ruin all the dancing (you’re terrible and we’re lying to you) and they always break a heel or puke or cry or all three. Sorry, go to straight clubs and listen to DJ Lil Italy spin your dubstep favourites because the foam party is over.
7) The Gay IT Department is closed, so call the lezzers instead. (Though they’re probably not taking your calls now: see Julie Bindel.) By the way, straight men, all your tech-savvy girlfriends are calling us for advice, then acting like they knew how to set up a BlackBerry. Some are even doing it for job advice. All lines are now busy at the Gay IT Helpdesk. Call the boyfriend you’ve been abusing, see if he wants to help you turn off roaming at 1am.
8) We’re telling everybody all the secrets. Even that one time you did that one thing you swore you’d never do again, and then you did it for three more Thursdays. Do you know how many beers straight men will buy us for these stories you’ve entrusted to us? Enough to make us all make bad decisions, which I see as win-win for everyone. But yeah honey, you felt like a slag because you were one. Buckle up.
9) I’m not saying gay men have immediate and ready access to all the best drugs, but if they did it doesn’t matter any more because you’re cut off, snowflake. Maybe your dealer will still hook you up if you do #8 again.
10) When you say, “How do I look?” we will, from this day forward, be 100 per cent honest. You’ve seen me 100 per cent honest on my Twitter feed. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and fix that hair.
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Twitter and Facebook. He’s a riot. Android users can download Milo Alert! to be notified about new articles when they are published.