Sexism, Sexuality and that Damn Oscars Song

Seth MacFarlane’s hosting of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony is, by now, a well-critiqued car crash. The articles here, here and here are well-argued, analytical and clearly document why the racism and sexism his jokes were based on is deplorable. 

But one aspect of his routine that might have been overlooked is the chorus that supported MacFarlane during his opening number, We Saw Your Boobs. MacFarlane, a trained singer and pianist, was backed in that crass and tasteless number by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles (GMCLA), an organisation that, according to its website, has the vision to sing “for a future free from homophobia and all other discrimination”.

Well, here’s the thing. Agreeing to sing a song that propagates entrenched discrimination in an industry that is hardly known for being diverse and supportive of equality seems like a strange way to fight discrimination. That is where the GMCLA failed, and failed quite spectacularly.

But this is the stinger: not only did the GMCLA fail in fulfilling its own vision; its participation as a willing accomplice in an awfully sexist performance is symptomatic of a wider phenomenon: discrimination in the LGBT community itself. 

To be clear, I am not accusing the GMCLA or any of its members of being consciously sexist. What I am asserting, however, is that their actions are part of a wider phenomenon, whereby a minority community that faces discrimination itself adopts and entrenches other discriminations that the majority community perpetrates. For example, think of ethnic minority communities that may discriminate against disabled people. Or in this case, gay white men demonstrating sexism. (I’m staying away from racism within LGBT communities in this piece, because that is a massive can of worms in itself.)

People like to believe that communities that have historically faced discrimination are supposed to be more accepting of other minorities. This is both naïve and simplistic. By that argument, there would be no black people who were homophobic, nor lesbians who had a problem with Muslims. 

The point is this: an individual identity is made of multiple strands: gender, race, sexuality, nationality, education levels, etc. A ‘community’ (German, university alumni, LGBT, Methodist, etc) relies on fostering a collective of people on the basis of one or more elements of their individual identities. Just belonging to one community does not immediately rid its members of their ties to other communities. It also does not remove the prejudices and biases that their membership of those other communities might bring. 

It is therefore normalised for most gay men, regardless of their sexuality, to propagate the sexism inherent in societies. Just because they may not be sexually interested in women does not mean they still do not have male privilege; this privilege may be ‘diminished’ by the discrimination they themselves may face for their sexuality, but it still exists, in different forms. 

Gay attitudes reflecting sexism and misogyny have been discussed recently in several articles (see here and here for good examples) though there is need for more systemic research into this area. For example, the ubiquitous fag hag stereotype in Western gay culture is a good example of this, where a woman who is purportedly unable to ‘land a man of her own’ supposedly seeks out gay male companionship. There is also extensive (though arguably anecdotal) evidence of gay men privileging their own access to female bodies, using their supposed lack of sexual interest as licence to grope women’s bodies (Isaac Mizrahi at the Golden Globes being an excellent case in point if you need illustrating.)

So did the GMCLA think about the sexism that the song they were performing at the Academy Awards? Quite probably not. In the same way that a gay man might not think racial profiling at an airport is a bad thing. Gay people are people first, and they are victim to the same fallibilities; unthinking prejudice being one of them.

A New Visa Form

For those of you who follow this blog, my Twitter feed, or generally interact with me, you will probably know that I am about as anti-imperialist, post-colonial and post-modern as they come. As such, it may not surprise you that I often (and vocally) take umbrage at writers and commentators from the "West" who may choose to express an opinion about the lives and experiences of men and women in a way that either misrepresents those experiences, privileges their own backgrounds, experiences and narratives as a meta-narrative normative that is homogenous and one to aspire to, and/or elides relevant voices or experiences if they do not fit into their own perceptions of the matter under discussion.

So it was not without some disgust that I read this article that appeared on the Huffington Post, in which a white western woman has a conversation with a cab driver in Luxor, Egypt, that - somewhat incredulously - extends to discussions of sex and how the protagonist, a poor, "enlightened" Eygptian taxi driver, having been made aware of the pleasures of sexual intercourse with "sexually liberated" European women, was dissatisfied in Egypt, given the "widespread" prevalence of female genital mutilation. Hailing from the Nick Kristof / Thomas Friedman school of neo-imperialist writing, the writer as liberal investigator is basically nothing more than a misery tourist who, on the basis of limited interactions with the "natives", returns home triumphant and full of insight that we are to accept as absolute, factually accurate, and effectively the last word. 

My disgust with the article, not to mention the high visibility it was receiving by virtue of being on a site like the Huffington Post, was matched by Sara Salem, a blogger that I have recently started interacting with online. Our shared opprobrium was quickly turned into a satirical discussion around the need for a new style of visa questionnaire to weed out such visitors to the non-Western world. (Ironically, most Western commentators, travelling on first world passports, do not require visas - at least short-term ones - to visit many of the countries they formulate ill-informed opinions about. This asymmetry of access, obviously, only works in favour of Western "tourists", unlike most intellectuals from the third world, whose global movements are closely curtailed and systemically restricted by international visa regimes.)

So here, in no particular order, is a list of questions that both of us felt would be appropriate to ask anyone looking to visit Egypt (or indeed any other country of interest to white Western commentators) to screen out ill-informed and poorly thought out articles of the sort that triggered our initial disgust.

1. Are you, or have you ever been, an utter idiot?
2. Do you enjoy saving people?
3. Are you aware that Egypt is no longer a British colony?
4. Please list, along with weight, any imperialist burden that you carry. Use additional paper if necessary.
5. What are your thoughts on Thomas Friedman and Nick Kristof?
6. Are you completely dismissive of your own privilege?
7. Do you have fantasies of wearing a burqa while in Egypt 'to see what it feels like'?
8. Do you like appropriating voices in your professional life?
9. Are you aware that harems are a fiction of your collective white imagination?
10. Are you, or have you ever been, an advocate for Ayaan Hirsi Ali?
11. Are you aware that the term 'Mohamedan' is no longer in use?
12. Do you believe that Islam is incompatible with Western values?
13. Will you be asking locals why they hate you and why they personally carried out 9/11?
14. Will you seek out meaningful human interactions, on the basis of which to extrapolate sweeping generalisations?
15. Will you keep asking about 'Sharia' in a terrified yet knowing tone?

Feel free to send in more that you think might be worth including on our questionnaire!

(PS - Sara has since written an excellent rebuttal to the original article, which you can read here.)