[quote] Radical feminist theorists have analysed the construction of male sexuality as resulting from ruling class status and the availability of a subordinate class of women on whom to act out. This form of sexuality is extremely dangerous to the interests of women, in asmuch as it leads to the rape and murder of women. This has not been a popular point of view amongst gay activists or sexual libertarian lesbians and feminists who have attacked those feminists who demand that men change, as ‘anti-sex’ or ‘essentialist’. The radical feminist critique has now been power fully taken up by many of those concerned to contain the global AIDS epidemic. The Panos Institute publication, AIDS and Men: Taking Risks or Taking Responsibility? (Foreman 1999), argues that AIDS is an epidemic which has a political cause in the form of masculine risk-taking and irresponsible behaviour originating in the inequality between men and women. AIDS, according to this analysis, can be seen as a disease of male supremacy.
[quote] Gay Male Pornography , as we have seen, is a major aspect of the definition of public sex offered by queer theorists and Sex Panic members. Pornography has achieved iconic status in queer theory, and its defence is central to the agenda of queer politics. Well-known queer art critics, legal theorists and queer theorists state that pornography is crucial to gay men’s survival, to their identities, and to their ability to do sex.
[quote] A number of gay male commentators have criticized the masculinity of gay male porn and the wider cult of masculinity in gay culture in recent decades as being antithetical to support for women’s liberation. They have pointed out that gay men cannot have their masculinity if women are to be free from oppression. These critiques have not been heeded by gay men who support pornography, most likely because their gay audiences have not known why they should bother about women. They have been concerned only for themselves. For this reason, critics of the values and practices of gay porn have sought to frame their arguments in ways that appeal to gay men’s sense of self-preservation
[quote] Gay men responded by getting lesbian and bisexual women, often with vested interests in the newly developing lesbian sex industry, to support them against the anti-pornography feminists. They sought to split the opposition, so that they could maintain their porn and their privileges
[quote] Pro-pornography lesbians say that they learnt to appreciate pornography by looking at gay male porn and subsequently incorporated ‘gay male sexual iconography into their fantasies, sex play and cultural representations’
[quote] The highest value absorbed through such incorporation is that masculinity is to be worshipped. In the 1980s this was reflected in a revaluing of lesbian ‘butchness’, and in the 1990s in the evolution of ‘transmen’, many of whom sought to become ‘gay men’ after surgery, despite, in most cases, the absence of any form of phalloplasty.
[quote] The pursuit of the penis and the masculine privilege derived from male dominance is a sad and hopeless quest for lesbians. Even surgery cannot supply such a holy grail, since transsexual operations cannot construct a functional phallus.
[quote] For feminists who understand pornography to be the ‘propaganda of woman hatred’ and wish to eradicate it, gay men’s defence of their own form of pornography is a significant obstacle.
[quote] If the interests of constituencies other than privileged American gay men are to be taken seriously, then this kind of sexuality needs to be transformed, rather than protected.
[quote] Gay men constitute an influential lobby group. By arguing, as many do, that gay porn is necessary for gay men’s survival, they protect pornography, in direct contradiction to feminist concerns that it is an active threat to the survival of women.
