> I have never encountered a rational argument for homophobia.
A gay friend told me about the theory that homophobia is misogyny e.g. some people are homophobic because they don't like men acting like women (mannerisms, dress, voice pitch, sensitivity) because they dislike women.
Ironically enough, a homophobic friend told me about the theory that homosexuality is misogyny e.g. some men are homosexual because they dislike women and don't want to associate with them.
Interestingly enough, I'm pretty sure my comment will shock more people than your comment--even though both comments posit some sort of handwavy unsubstantiated psychological theory nakedly constructed to fit some sort of political bias, yours sounds better because it fits the political bias most of us--myself included--agree with.
Or--to put it a more direct way--speculating about the psychology of people who disagree with you is an especially useless type of ad hominem.
There was a study that went like this (but I can't find it now...I hope I remember it correctly):
We take a sample of subjects. They sit in a room. They are told that in the other room is another person that they will play a game against (actually the outcomes of the games they play are the same for everyone). At some point this involves giving electric shocks to this person. Before they start they are shown a movie of this other person. Now, part of the group gets a movie of a man acting normal and the other part is gets a movie of the same man acting gay. After this the subjects are tested for gayness. It turned out that there is a positive correlation between gayness and the severity of the electric shocks delivered to the gay acting guy. So the theory is that homophobes are (a little) gay themselves, and they are afraid that they act like the gay guy.
That's fine if you take the word "homophobia" at face value, but it's become a politically overloaded term, and it's not right to accuse people of mental illness just because they disagree with you.
We need a better word for "anti-gay bigotry". Or, better yet, a set of such words which apply to common subsets of the LGBTQ alphabet-soup categorization. Right now all we have are words like homophobia and transphobia, which would do alright if only they didn't have the mental illness connotations.
The connotation of "heterosexism" seems closer to "heteronormativity" than "homophobia"--basically the assumption that everyone is heterosexual, or the establishment of heterosexuality as a social norm. For (potentially poor) example, if a television series has a homosexual character who is stereotyped and portrayed in a negative light, that's homophobia. If a television series has no homosexual characters at all despite prominently portraying heterosexual characters and relationships, it's heterosexist or heteronormative.
I think it would make more sense to use this word the way homophobia is used now. It more closely parallels "racism" as the belief that some races are inherently superior to others.
Would we call a TV show with no minority characters "racist?" Maybe, but it might be seen as stretching the meaning of the word, and the question of whether or not the show was actually racist would be a question to debate, not a part of the definition. I suppose we could have terms for TV shows, movies, corporate boards, startups, etc. that lack minority, gay or other kinds of people. But using an "-ism" for such terms implies discrimination, which I believe should remain open for discussion and debate.
One explanation of homophobia that has some support behind it is that the most homophobic men are fearful of their own homoerotic impulses and are lashing out as 'proof' that they are anything but.
A gay friend told me about the theory that homophobia is misogyny e.g. some people are homophobic because they don't like men acting like women (mannerisms, dress, voice pitch, sensitivity) because they dislike women.