Musings: Of Effeminacy, Homosexuality, and Stereotyping

A friend of mine told me today that she had heard that gay couples has normative gender roles - that is, one of them was more manly and the other was more womanly. Now I believe that she spoke of what she heard, and in all probability respects homosexuals. But the ignorant stereotyping still got to me, and here I am typing away about the most talked about, and obvious topics, just to clear my own head.



We all love the exotic, the unknown, mainly because they are unknown. We like building our own stories and theories about it, flesh it out in all details, and then tell ourselves it is true. Be it that Martians are green in colour or that gay men are effeminate, we all do it. What we don't realise is that we often ground our imagination on how we see the world, the right and wrong of it. God made humans after His own image, after all, because our imagination cannot have our Creator look like a Green alien perhaps. Or for that matter the relationship dynamic between a same sex couple.

"I've heard even among gay couples, one is the womanly one."

This line of conversation irritates me to no end, but I also realise where it is born of. We like to fit the unknown to the known, to the norm - and the norm is a heterosexual relationship with fixed gender roles for the majority. So of course in a homosexual relationship, one has to be the "one wearing pants" and the other "in the kitchen". Offended yet?

The issue with stereotyping is not just based on what attributes we selectively placed on a people, Black people with long appendages, for example, but also on what we deem as right or appropriate. For example, women are the weaker sex, and hence through the ages stereotypes related to them had them fainting or fawning over strong men. Victorian women used smelling salts to reinforce these beliefs. An open secret, and yet the stereotyping continued to grow. I hope I do not need to talk about how women have a bad sense of direction or are bad drivers. You know, because I have zero of the former and hundreds of dents on my car with respect to the latter.

So why then are homosexual (men at least) seen to be effeminate? Researchers would have you believe it is because of childhood non conformative behaviour patterns - either they were 'sissies' in their childhoods, or 'girly' or any other of hundred derogatory terms. In fact, some researchers have even attributed childhood bullying to leading to the 'gayness' of men. As if homosexuality was a learned attribute. Then again, this belief is what has gone into religious institutions trying to cure men of their gayness - through torture and porn, no less, another stereotypical rendering of what a straight man should be. Oh, the irony.

What I suppose I am trying to get across, and failing at, miserably, is that it is not right to stereotype any people, even those who do not conform to the majority. Nothing is binary, or as simple as one template. I'm sure there may be gay couples where one is effeminate, as sure as I am there there exist gay couples where neither is, but by stereotyping, we are basically putting a picture in front of our eyes, and refusing to see beyond the canvas at the real situation. Because, let's be honest. Most of you all have never even met an openly gay man. I haven't. And so I resist the urge to draw a box of conformity to pen them in, just because it makes me feel all comfortable about my world-view. And I request you to resist your urge too.