[quote] I am not exaggerating the feminist position, and urge everyone to read Carol Hanisch's article, “Men's Liberation”, from the Redstockings anthology, Feminist Revolution; it is most instructive. Hanisch writes in a very clear, succinct, and straightforward manner; there is never any doubt what she is saying. The essence of her argument is that men's liberation groups are a reactionary development; that it is absurd to imagine that men are oppressed by the prevailing sex-roles, because all men profit from the oppression of all women; that therefore men have nothing to be liberated from. When she gets to homosexuality, Hanisch has this to say:
[quote] “Men's liberationists always bring up ‘confronting their own feelings about men’ by which they mean homosexuality. Male homosexuality is an extension of the reactionary club) meaning both group and weapon). The growth of gay liberation carries contempt for women to the ultimate: total segregation. The desire of men to ‘explore their homosexuality’ really means encouraging the possibility of homosexuality as a reaction against feminist demands. This is the reason the movement for “gay rights” received much more support only after women's liberation became a mass movement.”
[quote] The prejudice against male homosexuality contained in Kate Millett's highly influential book, Sexual Politics, is worse than that in Carol Hanisch's article, but it is more insidious. Millett's style is muddled and affected, and her bigotry emerges more in little digs and innuendoes than in direct statement.
[quote] To Millett, there is nothing positive about male relationships; they are simply power relationships. Either more powerful males exert dominance over weaker males, degrading them to the status of females, and deriving a peculiar satisfaction from bullyism; or males gang together to consolidate their power over women.
[quote] In Millett's world, men do not really like each other; it is only the sexual politics of the patriarchy that makes them spend so much time together.
[quote] Millett extends the term, “men's house culture”, referring to an institution in some primitive societies, to apply to all men's associations. She tosses in the Nazis, underworld thugs, Norman Mailer's U.S. Army, and some primitive sadism, in such a way as to imply that all men's groups are somehow fascistic in character.
[quote] Millett's hostility towards male friendship comes out most clearly in her chapter on D.H. Lawrence, a treatment that can fairly be described as vicious. The tenderest moments in Lawrence's novels, his attempts to describe the need men have for deep male friendship and male love, receive only ridicule and contempt from her pen. Her plot synopses are grotesque, both for their inaccuracies and for the animus that pervades them. If anyone thinks I am being overly harsh, I suggest a simple test. Read her chapter on D.H. Lawrence, especially her synopsis of Women in Love. Read Women in Love — a wonderful novel — and then draw your own conclusions.
[quote] At this point, to go through more feminist writers would involve mostly repetition, for the same themes occur over and over. Phyllis Chessler, in her book, Women and Madness, also puts forward the thesis that male homosexuality is an expression of misogyny. She also links male homosexuality to militarism and ridicules the “‘glorious’ tradition” of male homosexuality.
[quote] Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will blurs together voluntary homosexual acts and homosexual rape; it appears that to her, both are equally horrible.
[quote] Shulamith Firestone's book, The Dialectic of Sex, contains many nasty little digs against male homosexuality. Firestone accepts the Freudian Oedipal complex theory on the aetiology of male homosexuality. She also holds the extraordinary notion that men cannot be erotic objects, and that the female body is intrinsically more aesthetic.
