From: TMCCART3@ua1vm.ua.edu
Subject: Re: Castro Street (Re: Two threads:  women posting and "cures" and its spinoffs)
Organization: The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 17:40:16 GMT

In article <mattm-101292132123@mcmelmon.apple.com>
mattm@apple.com (Matthew Melmon) writes:
 
>In article <18103@autodesk.COM>, owen@autodesk.com (D. Owen Rowley) wrote:
>
>> > When they're ignored, des femmes fascistes feel hurt.  When they
>> > get attention, it's always the wrong kind of attention.
>>
>> Oh boy, your gonna get it now :-)
>
>I would have been perfectly safe if *you* didn't quote me (unless *you*
>are a part of des femmes fascistes kill file as well...).  There's a
>lot to be said for knowing some people aren't listening to you, and
>that you therefore are guaranteed closing arguments.
>
Sorry, Matthew, some of us femme fascistes (who you callin' femme, buddy?)
don't have kill files, the better to keep tabs on our ignorant brothers.
 
As I see it, the problem that has come clear after all my badgering about
female invisibility on soc.motss is that (some of) the men here see things
in terms of two simple equations:
 
Visibility/attention = leering
Lesbian/women's issues = how women manage to have sex without dicks
 
On the first issue:
I have never been to Castro Street and cannot pretend to know what it's
like to be a woman there. I got the impression from my reading of the
original Castro Street post that the original poster did not mean all
this as literally as the men have subsequently taken it.
 
On the second issue:
I'm not imagining this. One of my dear brothers on soc.motss, once he
got up the nerve to ask a question, could come up with nothing more
insightful than "What do lesbians do in sex clubs?" Perhaps I'm being
too hard on him, but I hear questions like that enough from *straight*
guys. I expect better here.
 
The point is that to many men "gay" means "gay male." They seem to neither
realize nor care that there are lesbians out there fighting the same kind
of fights. Okay, the AIDS crisis has not hit the lesbian community to any-
where near the degree it hit gay men, but lesbians are right there in the
trenches with PWAs, demonstrating, nursing male friends, crying and mourn-
ing. But I digress.
 
Gay culture is not restricted to raves, and show tunes, and Harvey Fierstein
(sp?) and any number of othher gay male icons/activities. Those cultural
references dominate soc.motss, understandably so because men dominate soc.
motss by sheer numbers. But it's not just a numbers game. Men here seem to
be aggressively uninterested in gay culture that's *not* male -- witness the
quickness (I know, I know, I've said it before) with which references to
lesbian culture and icons are sidetracked into something the men find
more interesting. We lesbians know a lot about your culture; we have little
choice. How much do you know about ours? How much do you care?
 
I can't make you care. I can ask politely that you refrain from doing
everything in your power to wrest a thread away from lesbian/women's
issues and steer it back into yet another gay male topic; failing that,
I can ask again that you change the Subject: line to acknowledge that
you *have* sidetracked the topic.
 
I can also ask that you be more conscious of the presence of women
in the struggle of gayfolk -- men and women -- for equality and accep-
tance.
 
Tracey
Shyster stealth lesbian weasel-in-training
Newsgroups: soc.motss