There's a lot of odd, deeply odd, profoundly strange things about modern society. Things that would make any hypothetical man traveling through time to our day from the past to have their heads explode in bewilderment. Perhaps one of the most salient characteristics of modernity, if not the most, is the presence of sexual identity groups. Sexual orientation, as they call it.
(This essay will be sprinkled with some completely random pictures and quotes I found on the internet to support my argument)
Traditional societies, according to the information they have, believe there are men, and there are women. Man and women marry and have sex (sometimes in reverse order) and have children and so on.
There are obvious differences in average behavior between men and women, which we can call masculinity and feminity. But there's also quite a lot of variation there, as in every single human trait, from size, to eye shape, to smell, to metabolism speed, you name it.
Some men are quite extreme in their masculinity. Some are rather closer to the middle of the spectrum. There's even some (a very little) overlap there. A woman in a million has a thicker beard than one man in a million. But still. Men are men, even effeminate men, and women are women, and that's it.
Now and then there are freaks who are *way* out of the spectrum. Again it happens in many other traits. Some men are taller than others, on a Gaussian distribution. Then a tiny few are midgets. Some people have more powerful legs than others. Some are born with a limp. Some men are manlier than others. Some are really girly. Some even pretend their are women or try to have sex with men. We call those homosexuals.
Now that's quite of a problem. Sex is very important. Sex is the basis of society, the prime motivator, especially for men. Sex must be channeled and controlled if a society is to stick together.
Human societies reacted differently to the existence of homosexuals. Some ignored the issue, taking care of individually troublesome cases but generally ignoring the phenomenon as a whole. That's the case of East Asia. They're good at that. "If it stinks, cover it", as they say in Japan. 臭いものに蓋. It worked for them.
In others, perhaps a majority of human societies, behavior was given priority. So if a man insisted in having sex with men; well that's what women do. So you're a woman. Yeah, you might look completely like a man. Have male genetics, we'd say today. But if you behave like a woman, the looks aren't what matters the most. We'll take care of your appearance. And so in Iran, for example, homosexual men are forced by the state to undergo "gender reassignment surgery". That is, they try to shape them as much as possible into women, then given legal female status. And out they go. They aren't very good looking women, but there's plenty of unfortunate men around who will be happy to tap them now and then. They can't have babies of course, so marriage is not likely, but they'll have to accept their lot. The same way midgets do.
I do wonder what they do with obstinate lesbians, if there's some creative Islamic solution to have them to have penises. I suspect that given the legal environment, women who are into women find a way of not being too obnoxious about it. But I digress. Muslims, Indians, Southeast Asians, to my knowledge all take this sort of strategy. And it works for them.
In the modern West, for some reason, we chose to give appearance priority. So if you look like a man, you are a man. You may be very girly. You may like to wear female clothes. You may like dolls and make-up. You may talk like a fag. You may have sex with men. But if you look like a man, you are a man. A different sort of man. A gay man. Certainly not a woman!
The same applies to women who happen to behave like men. They aren't men. They are women. Just odd women. Lesbians, we call them. This way of categorizing outliers on sexual behavior slowly crystalized in the West around the liberal revolutions. So in a way it grow exactly with modernity, and as I argue here is indeed perhaps the most characteristic aspect of modernity.
The operating principle here seems to be that choice of sexual partner is this one part of one's character, some kind of taste, not dissimilar from taste on food or drink. That men who have sex with men (MSM, as the medical bureaucracy puts it) happen to be effeminate in pretty much every aspect of their lives was not noticed very strongly, especially at the beginning. I guess it just happened that when gay men became a thing in 19th century England, middle and upper class homosexual men were socialized strongly enough into English masculinity that they just didn't come out as women trapped in male bodies. Oscar Wilde was homosexual, and he was kinda odd, but he didn't come out as being girly. For all the people of his time, he was just this bloke with weird sexual taste.
So perhaps because of this empiric lack of correlation among the elite (i.e. the people who shape the culture), or because Christianity doesn't contemplate sexual change, or because of Benthamite liberalism determining that all human behavior is about taste and pleasure and the most evil thing is to notice strange things about people's behavior (Bentham had good reasons to dislike people noticing his behavior); or perhaps because 19th century elites had low fertility and didn't want to lose the few boys they had even if they happened to behave like girls; at any rate, we in the West alone decided that homosexuality is about sexual taste, and not fundamental gender dysphoria.
Now this was a momentous decision. Never before in the history of the world, homosexuals, men and women, were given each a name, an identity. Names are no laughing matter. Names are socially approved categories. They are a social license to exist. Gay men now exist. Lesbians now exist. They never did before, but now they do. And since we gave them a name, Western society created categories of people where none existed before. And that has had very notorious consequences. Perhaps fatal consequences.
I should add that interpreting homosexuality as a sexual choice and not inborn gender dysphoria doesn't fit the scientific evidence we have, nor the historical evidence of what most of humanity has thought of the issue. For a very informative, and extremely readable book on the issue, look to Michael Bailey here. Here's my take on the book.
Whatever your take on what homosexuals are and how they came to be, one thing is clear, by their own admission. Gay men generally want to have sex with heterosexual men. But heterosexual men by definition won't have sex with men. So homosexuals have two choices here. They can undergo a sex change, either surgically complete (as they enforce in Iran), or some half-way (as its easy to see in Thailand), and try to convince heterosexual men to take them as women. Or they can give up on heterosexual men and have sex with fellow gay men.
Neither choice is very satisfactory. Most homosexual man can't pass as an attractive woman, even after extensive extensive surgery. And sex with fellow effeminate gay men requires industrial amounts of LARPing, having to make oneself look like a tough man when they really want to wear dresses, and empirically not a small amount of drugs. It is a tough life either way. No good solutions. It must be irritating, which is why gays tend to look irritated and often driven into extreme self-harming behavior.
Lesbians have it easier, if only by women having a much lower sex drive. Pretty women are out of reach, which sucks, but heterosexual women are much more open to persuasion in general, so it's orders of magnitude easier to get an average girl to date a lesbian than it is for a normal man to have homo sex. Women are just more into LARPing as a general rule, and as real manly lesbians tend to be much fewer than homosexual men, lesbianism seems to be an out of control mass-LARP game of women trying to play a game that nobody remembers who started and has actually very few real players in it.
Again, the key point here is that homosexuals don't want to have sex with each other. They want to have sex with heterosexuals. Which won't, by definition. The logical solution here would be for homosexuals to change their sex, which is again a very old and empirically attested solution practiced in many societies.
But mandatory sex-change has its drawbacks. You look like a freak, for one. And letting homosexuals keep their bodies unchanged also has many advantages. Not in the sexual realm, sure. But gay men in modern society get to choose whether to share their sexual choices. They may not come out of the closet, as we say, and just pass as a normal heterosexual man. That has many advantages. They get thus to dwell among heterosexual men; which they supposedly enjoy. And they also get to function as an effective secret society, helping each other covertly, promoting each other in jobs, giving each other businesses, covering each other's backs. Blackmailing each other. The Gay Mafia. It's a real thing.
They also get to influence men, persuading them into behaving in ways advantageous to homosexuals, while ostensibly offering advice as just one more man, one who happens to have a peculiar perspective on things.
It is by no coincidence that gay men are extremely overrepresented in political parties or in the mass media, or as public intellectuals. Perhaps the enjoy the rather effeminate nature of the jobs' activities (talking a lot, sounding pompous, frequent parties and public gatherings, gossip and conspiracies, etc.). At any rate they are everywhere, in a way which would not be possible if they were forced or strongly induced to change sex. Although ladyboys are everywhere in Thailand too, so who knows. But still, stealth obviously has some advantages, enough advantages to make the rather unnatural and contradictory gay-man lifestyle be bearable for them.
Note that the same applies for lesbian women, perhaps even more so. Lesbian women have been extremely active in influence operations since more than a century ago. The case can be made that every single feminist movement was started by lesbians, for two purposes. One, to push society to allow them to behave as men, which is what they crave by their own nature as women born with masculine brains. The second, perhaps unintended consequence, is to push women, by persuading them to advocate feminist causes and raising their standards of acceptable male behavior, to become so unfeminine, annoying and obnoxious to men that no men can bear their companionship, and thus drive what were perfectly fine and fertile women into the arms of lesbians.
Note that women weren't just fooled by a small bunch of tiny lesbians. Well, they kinda were, but they were fooled for a reason. It's like the old argument about the Jews hijacking Western society with their socialism and other destructive theories. Well, yeah, but you need two to dance. Jews sold a product because there was a market to it. Lesbians too sold their feminism because there was a market of eager buyers. The arguments were quite compelling, and they came with perfect timing, just as the modern industrial economy was giving women more economic opportunities, and thus more bargaining power versus men. And the lesbian feminist arguments were very useful for women at a moment they wanted to increase their bargaining power. And you can't blame them for it. Everyone wants to get a better deal.
On hindsight, the war has been extremely destructive to both sides, but that's the nature of war. Humanity has been waging war forever, knowing perfectly well that it is destructive to both sides, but we keep fighting, because one side at the beginning often think it has much to win.
Now of course this this doesn't absolve lesbians (or Jews) from blame from selling toxic ideas. Every society has conflicts and contradictions of some sort. But the infighting tends to be limited by traditional norms of conduct which go by the personal ties between people. A highly motivated, hostile outside group can break that traditional balance, selling ideological drugs in a market which might be open to it, but also traditionally expected some restrain from the suppliers. When the suppliers, not being an integral part of it, are motivated to destroy society in their benefit, that breaks the traditional balance of debate, and chaos ensues.
You might be asking yourself now: sure, there is a stealthy Gay Mafia, notoriously in politics or the Catholic Church. But while lesbians have been indeed obviously (if not quite openly) agitating for feminism in academia and literature, what have gay men been advocating for? Sure plenty of them have been openly advocating for gay rights, "pride", sometimes even for legal changes to allow pederasty and other abhorrent behavior. But where have gay men been stealthily nudging heterosexual men into their camp, using cleverly packaged rhetoric that seems to increase the bargaining power of men, the way lesbians have been trolling heterosexual women into feminism as a pathway to lesbianism?
I will elaborate on the next post. On the meantime there are some hints hidden here, somewhere.
