These proxies are troubling though.

For example, in 2010, Project Runway judge and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi grabbed Scarlet Johansson’s breasts on the Golden Globes Red Carpet. When she looked visibly mortified, he retorted that he’s gay so it’s okay. Not so by her count. But when he acts so intrusively with little to no consequences, it sends a message to gay men who are still negotiating their identities and attempting to figure out how to fit into a world that still hasn’t found a way to reconcile queer identity completely.

Over at The Good Men Project, Yolo Akili writes:

At a recent presentation, I asked all of the gay male students in the room to raise their hand if in the past week they touched a woman’s body without her consent. After a moment of hesitation, all of the hands of the gay men in the room went up. I then asked the same gay men to raise their hand if in the past week they offered a woman unsolicited advice about how to “improve” her body or her fashion. Once again, after a moment of hesitation, all of the hands in the room went up.

So you have young gay men witnessing Mizrahi’s behavior; “I’m gay” gets handed down as an acceptable excuse for gay men to probe and disrespect women’s bodies. It’s endemic of a gay male culture that would sooner trot out a history of being victimized as an excuse for acting like assholes rather than taking ownership for said behavior, or better yet, correcting that kind of behavior.

Mizrahi is one example. On Will & Grace, you could create an entire drinking game around the number of times Jack recoils at the mention of female sexuality or says something about Grace’s body; it’s meant to be winky and fun, but ends up sounding like a broken misogynistic record. There are memes–like Sassy Gay Friend–which, for all their humor, reinforce the idea that it’s okay for gay men to call women “silly bitches” if it serves a comic context.

Title card for Sassy Gay Friend

Both examples highlight the problem with the fag hag construct as well. This idea that there is a 1:1 ratio of newly-out gay men and their best female friend is objectification of the highest order; it serves neither party. It paints a picture of gay male sexuality that necessitates the role of a women–but furthermore, it paints the picture of women serving men, propping them up. Women end up objectifying gay men as surrogates for girlfriends or pretty plus ones at parties; gay men end up objectifying women as de facto therapists and punching bags, who are expected to make them feel better about themselves, all while weathering a casual deluge of slurs like “slut”, “ho”, and “bitch.” When gay men and women can rise above the gendered nature of their relationship, these destructive tendencies melt away, but it’s more likely that these relationships implode.

In Adam Goldman’s The Outs, we see this 1:1 ratio fail spectacularly as one of the series’ most riveting and relatable plots. Mitchell and Oona are presented to us as best friends, but throughout the series’ seven-episode run, they grow more and more estranged. Mitchell turns to Oona as a sounding board for his failed relationships, while Oona relies on Mitchell to act as a pretty plus one when she attends an ex-boyfriend’s cocktail party. She even commands him to take off his cardigan and “butch up.” As far as female friends to gay men go, Oona is wonderfully brash–which is why we’re able to see this relationship, premised on objectification, collapse.

Surprising as it is to many, there are also women who aren’t as brash or outspoken as Oona. In fact, the idea that female friends to gay men should be crude and loud and messy is in itself an awful stereotype that’s perpetuated by gay men as well. As gay men, many of us interpret the silence of female friends we’ve being insulted as consent. So it allows us to consider that it’s appropriate for us to treat the entire gender accordingly. At some point, a female friend might say, “That’s not okay,” or they might slap you–but you had it coming. That’s all it takes and many of us grow out of this kind of thinking. But others don’t.

It’s how you end up with countless cliques of gay men whose social lives consist almost exlcusively of hanging out with other gay men. How can you learn to be a human if you’re just hanging out with clones of yourself?

Barbie Doll Packaging

Perhaps the way gay men act towards women can be summarized by how they regard women as tropes–owing in part to diva worship culture inherent in gay male identity. It’s a specific kind of thinking that permits gay men to dehumanize women–viewing them as abstract objects. It’s probably also why a blogger like Perez Hilton can so easily build an entire brand off slighting the bodies of female performers and entertainers.

In fact, in 2009, Jezebel’s Anna North compiled a partial list of Hilton’s descriptions of female celebrities. It would be easy to disregard Hilton’s comments as the outbursts of a lone internet loon if there weren’t countless gay men who weren’t already following his example. Somehow being gay has become a coded way for many men to assume there’s no wrongdoing when they talk about women’s bodies, when they jokingly use “ho”, “slut”, or “bitch” as a synonym for “lady” or “woman”–and the spriteness with which they get defensive when called out for this kind of impropriety.

An advantage of gay manhood in particular is that many of us are complicit in the way female body image is packaged, marketed, and distributed across media. We are complicit in the total objectification of female performers in entertainers by elevating them to goddesses or condemning them as flops. Diva worship is one of the ultimate forms of objectification. Lady Gaga, Christina Aguilera, Selena Gomez, Beyoncé: These are all performers whose handlers and makers cultivate brand identities in order to make them seductive to the gay male aesthetic. It’s ironic because these stars are packaged as demigoddesses, but by making them appear to be more-than-human, they are sold to us as products, as something stripped of humanity. Divas are objects; women are not. Divas are nothing more than glorified Barbie dolls. Women are not.

Lady Gaga from ARTPOP campaign artwork

Diva worship has become insidious–a way to reinforce a myth of aspirationalism wherein many gay men indicate to the opposite sex that unless they are worthy of achieving this absurdly lofty status, they are nothing more than interchangeable fag hags.

Think about the language:

“Britney is slaying!”

“Gaga is better than your faves!”

“She looks so fat in that dress!”

“She’s so fugly!”

“What a ho.”

How gay men speak about female performers contributes to objectification–whether intentionally or otherwise. We sometimes say a performer is “slaying” as a superlative way of saying she’s doing something amazingly. This is not a problem. We should always be so upbeat about female performers; the problem occurs when the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme; we say she’s a “hot mess” as a superlative way of saying she’s doing something poorly. It’s always superlative. There is no slang term for her to just be. Contrastingly, this kind of language is used rarely-to-never when discussing male pop stars–like Justin Timberlake or Drake, for example. A large part of that owes to the fact that male pop stars don’t fulfill the trope of diva worship how female pop stars do.

Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj from “Up Out Of My Face” video still

We are trained to idolize our pop divas as if they’re flesh-and-blood Barbie dolls. To fulfill our duties as fans, we put down other pop divas. These performers stop being women to us through the language we use–they either become goddesses or trash. This is where the nasty language becomes eminent. It all becomes more problematic when this language is applied wholesale to all women, allowing gay men carte blanche to regard women as objects physically.

Facsimiles of Femininity

Gay male culture requests womanhood when it comes in the form of some kind of frothy entertainment commodity–where we are asked not to actually think about the woman herself, but the made-up packaged product before us.

We have even identified what constitutes womanhood, like garish eye make-up, over-the-top fashion, wildly theatrical mannerisms, and so on. We’ve figured out how to weave these trappings of femininity into spectacular facsimiles of femininity without actually empathizing with these women. It’s why Ryan Murphy excels at writing Jessica Lange’s glamorous, if morally reprehensible personas on American Horror Story. We love Lange as Constance Langdon, Sister Mary Jude, and Fiona Goode, but are never convinced that she’s anything more than an enthralling anti-heroine trope.

Popular culture even largely accepts that gay men know enough about women’s bodies to design clothes for them. Something problematic that Karl Lagerfeld once said: “The woman is the most perfect doll that I have dressed with delight and admiration.”

Well, then.

To that end, it’s even universally accepted that gay men can advise women on how to wear their hair or make up, or do a proper runway walk. This is ironic when you realize that many gay men spend little actual time interacting with women or regarding them as human beings. Again, we go back to Lagerfeld’s “dolls” comment. Or furthermore, how little real world experience gay men have with women’s bodies. After all, we are defined by our desire to have sex with other men, not women.