WHEREAS, lesbians have historically been specifically targeted, on the basis of sex and sexual orientation . . .
In April of 2024, in Part I of “Why Are Lesbians Hated,” the Lesbian Caucus wrote:
To live a female-centered life is to defy the patriarchal nature of the world we live in; and patriarchy can’t tolerate that; such defiance must be punished.
In the current article we’re going to explore in greater detail why patriarchies cannot afford to tolerate lesbians and other women who live a female-centered life; and how we might be able to exploit that vulnerability.
One way of looking at the Trump election victory is that it represents in part a win for the ideology of all men’s unabashed dominance over all women. So, why and how is the ascendancy of Trump-style patriarchy likely to affect lesbians in particular? At least one Trump Republican has intimated that lesbians will be restigmatized under their plan for cultural reorganization. We will speculate here about how that may be expected to work – who is likely to benefit; and how; and how we can most effectively resist.
While a few Republicans appear to recognize that women themselves should own a right to single-sex bathrooms and single-sex sports that supersedes men’s demands for access to them (e.g., Representatives Nancy Mace and Seth Moulton), other Republicans, most notably Trump himself, focus on men’s “protection” of women and girls “whether they want it or not.” Meaning that, for the latter group, the focus is not on women’s rights, but on men’s duty to protect all members of their respective families because men are seen as the rightful heads of their respective households. The benefit to men of performing the duty of protecting their women is the continued dominance of the male sex class in both private and public spaces. Meanwhile, women unprotected by men are fair game for all the brothers.1
The explicit cultural ideology underlying the male head-of-household’s duty to protect is that any woman is innately vulnerable, and therefore needs a man’s protection if she and her children are to thrive. This notion is useful to justify male domination; so it is in the interests of continued male dominance to make sure that all women feel vulnerable all the time on the basis of their sex. A parallel strand of patriarchal ideology states that heterosexuality for women is innate, as is a love not only for men, but for subordination itself (i.e., femininity). An implicit axiom is that men, for reasons that are innate to men, are destined to take, by force if needed, whatever valuable stuff is unprotected by another man, whether it be sex or property.2 Women are framed as poorly equipped to protect their own bodies, their children’s bodies, or their own property from men. In fact, since women are themselves property, it is absurd for them to own property at all; so women’s property should be seen as rightfully belonging to the man who controls that woman; or, in the case of an unprotected woman, to any man who can find a way to take possession of it.
Several other cultural assumptions underlie this more heavy-handed form of patriarchal ideology, or flow from it:
- Men are by nature brutal rapists and thieves. Dominance defines manhood. A man’s social ranking among men depends on his ability to dominate other men; but every man must dominate every woman he interacts with to avoid having his manhood/masculinity questioned. Therefore, masculinity is repeatedly tested and must be repeatedly proved, especially on the backs of all women.
- A man’s status is bestowed by other men; women’s opinions have no effect on status.
- If a man refrains from taking what he wants from a woman because he respects another man who is protecting her, that is commendable and interpreted as brotherhood, and is not a basis for loss of status among men.
- If a man fails to take what he wants when he wants it from an “unprotected” woman, he is suspected of not being a real (masculine) man, and therefore risks losing social status. Apparent respect for an unprotected woman is mocked, framed as weakness, and may even be punished by the brothers.
- Empathy with women is mocked and otherwise discouraged. Empathy with a woman raises the suspicion that you may be to some extent womanly yourself. Women are to be “othered”; it is patriarchal doctrine that manly men are unable to understand women because men and women are so polarized; in fact, the incoming patriarchal brotherhood is not convinced that women are truly human. But in any case, empathy and respect are to be reserved for other men.
Taken together, that’s a lot of social control aimed at creating and maintaining the cultural conditions that enable the subordination of women. The irony that such heavy social control is necessary to prop up the notion that male domination and female subordination are natural, innate, and desired by all appears to have eluded the new brotherhood.
Lesbians are subjected to all of those controls and more, raising the following question: Does lesbianism actually pose a realistic threat to patriarchy? Dee Graham wrote in Loving to Survive (1994): “To the extent that females resist being feminine, while still embracing our femaleness, we challenge cultural norms of female subordination.” We agree.
The threat by lesbians to patriarchy is both ideological and material; and this is true whether or not lesbians are aware of it. As Andrea Dworkin stated in Intercourse (1987), sexual intercourse is the primary expression of male dominance and female subordination. It is a fundamental belief of patriarchal ideology that men have sexual agency and women don’t. One problem presented to patriarchy by lesbians is that lesbians undermine the notion that without a penis there can be no satisfying sexual activity. But the problem of the existence of lesbianism undermining patriarchal assumptions doesn’t remain restricted to the sexual arena. If women might have sexual desire, sexual gratification, and sexual agency independent of any man, the patriarchal ideology of absolute polarity and complementarity of the sexes (i.e., domination vs. submission) is undermined, starting with the inevitability that all women can be subordinated through sexual intercourse. If the patriarchal essence of femininity is to be screwed (both meanings intended), and if all females must be feminine, then lesbians who successfully violate these rules must not be allowed to thrive under their own agency.
If it becomes widely known that women can thrive without making a deal for male protection in exchange for sex, then every ideological pillar of patriarchy is thrown into question.
If it becomes widely known that lesbians can thrive in every way without a male head of household, then the social status of lesbians will increase, and being a lesbian could become an attractive option for all women, especially given the dangerous culture built on violent pornography that currently shapes heterosexual relations.
So it’s in the interests of patriarchy everywhere to ensure that the truth remains hidden, and that lesbians are made invisible and silent. The script initially goes something like this: “They’re probably not lesbians; they’re either ‘trans’, or they’re bisexual, or else they just haven’t met the right man.” So the first patriarchal defense is to make lesbians invisible.
In case invisibility fails, the secondary messaging aims at containment: “Sexual orientation is innate and immutable; so women can’t become lesbians just because they want to.” But we know that they can, and the WDI USA Lesbian Caucus’ Coming-Out Group, among other examples, has shown that women can indeed become lesbians.
So in case the second lie – that lesbianism is innate and immutable – fails, the third patriarchal line of defense is that lesbians will be vilified, disempowered, persecuted, ridiculed, drugged, therapized, humiliated, and made unemployable. Taken together, these three lies tell women that there’s no such thing as a lesbian; if there is such a thing as a lesbian it isn’t you; and if it is you, you will be punished for it.
Ultimately, all of these defenses are necessary because patriarchists intuitively understand that free and strategically aware lesbians will be coming for their wives and daughters – not as rapists, but as a community of woman-centered women who in reality offer a better life for all women.
Patriarchy understands that the message of free lesbians, spoken explicitly or not, to all women, will be that they offer a more attractive deal in every way. And it will be demonstrably true, as shown by the recent example of the popularity of the 4B movement in both South Korea and the United States. Patriarchy will then be exposed to substantial damage – ideological, political, and economic; for example, through the loss of women’s free household management labor and emotional labor.
Can patriarchy survive such damage? If manhood has been understood to provide every man, regardless of economic status, with the expectation of having a wife and a male heir, and with the right to head-of-household status within that nuclear family structure, what happens to patriarchy when large numbers of men are unable to obtain wife, heir, and head-of-household status? What happens to the very small number of ruling-class men when they are faced with a large population of angry working men unable to access the promised patriarchal rewards? Will they turn on the lesbians? Probably; they already do, with regularity. But that won’t solve their problem. So will they turn on the financial and political oligarchs? Do the oligarchs want to bet they won’t?
Lesbians will need to assess the dangers of male rage directed toward us. The extreme violence of current online porn illustrates the current nature and current level of male rage. The drive to subordinate women — especially noncompliant women — by depicting the humiliation of women psychologically and the destruction of women physically is eroticized, making it both initially seductive and then addictive.
But how much do women have to lose by putting as much distance as possible between themselves and men? Isolating yourself with a master in the master’s house in a time of escalating eroticized male violence against women, and then simply hoping for the best, is increasingly not a reasonable survival strategy. Creating as much distance as possible, and creating primary community bonds with women appears to us to offer both better survival odds and better odds for a good outcome for women, both individually and collectively.
A problem is that presently a woman can’t count on other women to support and protect her when she is faced with a violent man in her home, in a public women’s bathroom, or on a moving train. Women will need to create communities and cultural practices where protecting each other and any woman who needs protection can be relied on.
In the late 1960s there was a small community of lesbians living in the rainforest on Hawaii’s Big Island, getting by by growing and selling exotic flowers and weed. It was generally known that if a woman needed shelter from an abusive man, she could find shelter with the lesbians in the rainforest. If a man was foolish enough to drunkenly follow his wife to the lesbian compound, he would experience multiple guns pointed at him.3
Women might consider actively encouraging other women to join together in communities of woman-centered women; and to actively encourage other women to become lesbians. Sex has the potential to create strong bonds when it is combined with love and admiration, rather than on the hope of heterosexual privilege, or the need to get food or to avoid social stigma or male violence. Arguably, sex and love that are not structurally transactional are possible right now only among lesbians. Once lesbians understand that we have little to lose by resisting cooperation in our silence invisibility; or by resisting cooperation in the lie that straight women can’t become lesbians; or by resisting cooperation in being vilified, persecuted, ridiculed, drugged, therapized, etc., then men will have good reason to fear us. And we may have reasonable odds of changing the world order.
The WDI USA Lesbian Caucus
Lauren Levey, coordinator
KC Bianco
Mary Ellen Kelleher
Katherine Kinney
- We are grateful for the work of Jo Brew describing the structure of modern patriarchy as a brotherhood, meaning rule by all men, rather than rule by patriarchs, meaning fathers. ↩︎
- We are grateful to Sheila Jeffreys’ writing on what she terms the “male sex right.” Penile Imperialism (2022) and The Industrial Vagina (2009) are among her works that discuss this useful concept. ↩︎
- Anecdotally, in 1971 a Hawaii legislator proposed to the lesbians that they could get state funding to set up the state’s first women’s domestic-violence shelter. They agreed; some of them even got social-work degrees to comply with state funding requirements. It worked for a while, and then it didn’t; arguably they should have rejected state funding and continued to operate on their own terms. ↩︎
