It’s called “Calendargate,” and it’s raising the question of what — and whom — the right-wing war on “wokeness” is really for.
While most people were enjoying the holidays, extremely online conservatives were fighting about a pinup calendar.
Last month, Ultra Right Beer — a company founded as a conservative alternative to allegedly woke Bud Light — released a 2024 calendar titled “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America 2024 Calendar.” The calendar contains photos of “the most beautiful conservative women in America” in various sexy poses. Some, like anti-trans swimmer Riley Gaines and writer Ashley St. Clair, are wearing revealing outfits; others, like former House candidate Kim Klacik, are fully clothed. No one is naked.
But this mild sexiness was just a bit too much for some prominent social conservatives, who started decrying the calendar in late December as (among other things) “demonic.” The basic complaint is that the calendar is pandering to married men’s sinful lust, debasing conservative women, and making conservatives seem like hypocrites when they complain about leftist immorality.
LOL, let them fight. Also, the right wing’s weird obsession with trans women is just soooo revealing. I think they have some real inner demons they are wrestling with. I truly think some of them are deathly afraid they’ll be “fooled” by a trans woman and one of their buddies will find out and tease them mercilessly and their inner proclivities will be revealed…
I think people that are on the more hetero end of the sexuality scale don’t really think about this kind of thing at all (other than - “hey, that’s not really my jam, but live and let live”). But it seems to consume a certain kind of man, I’ve noticed.
The left should absolutely fan the flames with questions about who is actually in charge: the people making decisions or the people shutting down those decisions?
Is a calendar that celebrates women a bad thing if it embraces feminity?
Does a man have the right to his own decisions or does he have an obligation to lead and, by extension, be a moral leader?
How can a man enjoy being moral and enjoy women?
This is how the left breaks the right: the small minded man vs the moral minded man.
There is a great desire to see this kind of turnabout - for a long time people have said, without evidence, that the most anti-gay people are closeted, self-hating gay people themselves.
The real reason for this is because that juxtaposition, when it does occasionally happen, sticks in the mind precisely because it’s so weird. But good luck backing it up, especially to the degree people portray it, as you have done. (which is fairly black and white, “more hetero people don’t really think about this kind of thing”)
I would say this is due to the fairly steady stream of news articles detailing anti-LGBTQ politicians and figureheads that are caught having homosexual relations. Plus the study that suggests homophobia is rooted in denied homosexuality.
I think you’ve missed my assertion, which is that this is an example of confirmation bias. Listing examples of that confirm what I’m claiming is confirmation bias isn’t saying much. What about the thousands of people coming out as gay who haven’t got a history of anti-LGBT shit? Well they aren’t as interesting so you don’t remember them when you read such an article.
Your link is broken, but consider this: human beings are perfectly capable of hating one another for any difference, real or perceived. We don’t doubt that racism is down to hatred of the other, rather than the self, we don’t doubt that sexism is the same. Why is homophobia any different? Only because there is the potential for someone to be secretly gay.
I didn’t catch your mention of confirmation bias, I only saw where you said there’s no evidence that the most “anti-gay” people were closeted. So I provided an article that lists several vociferously anti-gay people that indeed had homosexual tendencies to explain why people might think that way (which is indeed evidence of at least the possibility of a correlative, if not causative, link), plus a study that systematically suggests that those observations actually may be causation. Of course that link promptly broke. Thanks APAnet. I tried to link directly but realized it’s paywalled if you or your institution doesn’t have a subscription. If you do have access, here’s a better direct link, now with less breaking, but all you’ll get without access is the abstract.
Here’s a real functioning link to a decent article explaining the study, including a video of one investigator literally confirming the assertion in the first few seconds. My favorite, though, is the lead author’s quote:
The study didn’t quantify an effect size for the degree of homophobia relating to homosexuality, i.e., are the biggest homophobes those with the greatest closeted homosexual tendencies? That would be interesting.
So while it’s absolutely ridiculous to state that all homophobes are hidden homosexuals, it’s not unreasonable to assert that being a closeted homosexual is one driver of homophobicity, therefore any homophobe may actually be homosexual to some degree with a greater likelihood than the probability of any particular person in the population being homosexual.
If you consider a study examining the concept as confirmation bias, especially since I failed to find any studies with results to the contrary, I’m not sure how this conversation can productively move forward. I’m a scientist, assertions are dandy but I need evidence to change my mind, though I’ll totally change it if you have it.
Thanks for the SciHub link, but it doesn’t say what you’re saying it does. It says that a particular kind of upbringing predicts a discrepancy between self-reported sexuality and a measure of “implicit sexuality.” They further found a relationship between self-reported straightness and homophobia when “implicit sexuality” was measured as “more gay”.
Leaving aside the fact that (in my quick read-through, at least) although there was a lot of effort given to validating that this measure measured something, there was little effort given to validating that it measured sexuality, this correlation does not allow one to conclude that “those who profess anti-gay views are likely to be gay themselves” which is the distillation of what was expressed above. Let us start from someone who professes those views. The research means that, if you know this detail of their upbringing and if you know that they explicitly identify as straight (not the same thing as public identification) then you can predict (with clear statistical significance, but still quite low correlation) that that person scores highly on this measure of “implicit homosexuality”.
If you check the summary table you can actually just read off the correlation coefficient between homophobic views and the measure of implicit homosexuality and see that it’s not statistically significant.
And I do think that the measure of implicit sexuality, though clearly interesting and measuring something is equally clearly not a measure of “are you gay regardless of what you say about yourself.” It’s reasonable to believe we can use it to estimate homosexuality, but it’s like measuring distance with a ruler where all the markings have been scraped off. So even if a study like this did have a correlation with its measure, you then would have to mute the strength of that correlation by the strength of correlation between the measure and the underlying reality we’re interested in.
First off, I want to take a moment to recognize why I love Lemmy compared to places like Reddit or Facebook, where your alternate media equivalent would likely have told me to get fucked and made some choice comments about my mother. Instead, we’re having what is, at least speaking for myself, an intellectually stimulating conversation. It got me to really read a study outside of my discipline. Love it!
Respectfully, I think you may have misunderstood the paper. What you stated is true, but it’s not the only things the investigators sought to examine. Their intent to look at reaction formation secondary to parental effectsis mentioned right in the abstract. Regardless, with enough quality data, observations secondary to the primary intent of the paper can be made, upon the results of which I’m basing my assertion.
So the point I’m making, that there may be validity behind the assertion that straight identifying homophobes may have repressed homosexual desire, is addressed right in the first study. They used a MANOVA both with and without controls for gender and parent conservative beliefs, so of course there’s a vomit stream of results. Looking at table 1, there’s a statistically significant correlation (p < .01) between participant homophobia and low explicit orientation, i.e., identifying as straight. Shocking, I know but hey, at least their gay participants don’t hate themselves!
But check out the results in study 1, which sought to assess the effects of parental autonomy support, participants’ implicit and explicit sexual orientation, and self-reported homophobia on the discrepancy between automatic and explicit measures of sexual orientation. In the “participant’s self-reported homophobia” paragraph, simple main effects split by self-reported sexual orientation suggested (I’m a scientist, I’ll rarely say “proved”) that individuals who identified low in explicit sexual orientation, i.e., straight, but had higher implicit gay orientation, i.e., maybe more a friend of Dorothy than they profess, related to higher homophobia, β= .56, t(32)= 3.79, p>.001. In the words of one of my old students, that’s totes significant. n=89, which is a little low but not awful.
Same in study two, which looked at parents attitudes of homosexuality on participant sexual orientation and homophobia. Back in the results, with more MANOVA chowder, again under “participant’s self-reported homophobia”, simple main effects suggested that higher implicit orientation, i.e., more potential repressed “flame on”, related to increased self-reported homophobia when explicit sexual orientation was low, i.e., “straight” as an arrow, β=.43, t(104)=4.79, p<.001. again, the goats of statistical significance give it a totes. n=181, I like this more.
And same in study three, same results section, same correlation. Simple main effects were split by high and low explicit sexual orientation and show that when participants identified as straight, higher implicit orientation positively correlated to self-reported homophobia, β=.43, t(62)=-1.38, p<.001. n=189, yay.
Section four? Same multivariate correlation between explicit and implicit orientation and self-reported homophobia, β=.67, t(132)=10.54, p<.001, n=181.
I think the issue you’re running into when you’re looking at the summary tables for each study is that it’s only illustrates a bivariate analysis while a MANOVA analyses multiple variables, making a two-dimensional representation of results kind of sprawling. You’ll either have a metric fuck ton of tables or, more commonly, the results are just in the text, which is what we’re seeing here. For example, the correlation just between implicit orientation and homophobia includes EVERYONE, straight, gay, and everything in-between. Anyone who isn’t repressed should have explicit and implicit scores that are pretty similar, so that’s going to muddy the waters, getting you no statistically significant correlation because that high implicit scores means different things for different groups but they’re all being considered together there.
Now, the study has some weaknesses. The sample size for each study isn’t real low, but it’s not very high either. Another issue is the relative homogeneity of each group. These guys were largely snagging college students from one or two colleges, which is a great way to grab a bunch of people at once, but is not always representative of the population. Lastly, psychology is squishy, so there’s always the question of if the methods of assessment result in accurate data, in other words, whether the tests were bullshit or not. To this study’s credit, it uses a variety of previously tested assessment methods. But it does absolutely suggest, with statistical significance, that participants who identified as straight but may have been a little gayer than they thought have a correlation with a higher occurrence of homophobia.
Whew. This is a lot, sorry!
By definition, a man being attracted to a femininity is the least homo thing possible. A man dating a woman is a hetero relationship, irregardless if she is cis or trans. Ironically, this post is telling on yourself for your own bias against trans people.
If you are gonna speak about trans issues, then you need to understand the issues they face. Because frankly, this sort of argument does more harm than good.
Having dated as a pre-op trans woman, there absolutely are a bunch of guys who clearly want cock (as in they beg me to top them/let them go down on me/cover them in rivers of sticky jizz), but still want to think of themselves as straight and feel guilty about wanting said cock. I think this is the population OP was talking about, they are often referred to as “chasers”.
My guess is that there are more conservatives in this situation because of the social repression associated with that belief. I also know from experience that unwanted feelings of attraction are often sublimated into anger and disgust … b-b-b-BAKA!
The guys who call themselves pan or bi and are like “I like tits, I like cock, let’s do this” behave completely differently and far less weird.
And there are also haters because Fox News told them to be (my father is one of them).
Perhaps! I am a trans woman not interested in bottom surgery, and that has led to a lot of men saying “where there is two pensises it’s gay”, regardless of the fact that I outwardly pass as a cis woman and have no interest in “using” my penis. Chasers were a real problem for me as well while I was dating, before my current (ace) relationship.
I think we could probally agree that there is a lot more conservative bigots out there then closeted chasers, but that’s kinds inherently unknowable, it’s not like these guys are gonna self report on survey.
So to my mind, it seems more likely to read this as a well intending yet confused ally instead of the much smaller subset of “publicly republican/closeted chasers”.
(and Im sorry for your father, my own family thinks I am dead because they are too concerned with making America great than respecting me)
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Awww, thank you for the kind words. ♥ 💕
To be honest, dating as a trans vegan left me with a funny story. The first two people I saw more than once, (who were also trans and vegan), turned out to be each other’s ex’s! I didn’t put it together until a few dates in but I suddenly became worried “Did I already find the edge of the dating pool?!? Is it really just the three of us?!?” I wouldn’t date a meat eater since I’m vegan for ethical reasons, cis and non-queer people were definitely a option, but it was surprising to me how many vegans were openly transphobic or made fetishizing type comments before even saying hello. 🙃
Thankfully it turned out to be 4 of us in my location. My partner and I have been together for two years and we still joke about finding #5 someday. 😂
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I think you misinterpreted their comment
It is not homosexual for a heterosexual cis man to be attracted to a trans woman. I’ll forgive and edit if the original poster misspoke or I misread, but if they are saying it’s gay for a man to be with a trans women (or it reveals their proclivity) then they are wrong and have the same biased takes as the conservites they are mocking.
I don’t think that’s the take they’re claiming. I interpreted what they wrote as referring to straight men not understanding why they are attracted to trans women. I think the “hetero end of the sexuality scale” portion was just to clarify the situation doesn’t really apply to bi or gay people as much, though I personally think a fair amount of cis gay men are very transphobic.
Nothing you said is false at all, I just don’t think the original commenter was trying to have that take. If that was the take, then I 100% agree with you.
Nah, nothing more masculine than gay sex.
Having a woman in the mix makes it too feminine.