In today's day and age, people have become more accepting of homosexuality. Now as a Christian myself, I have my own views about homosexuality, but that's another topic for another day. This is more of an observation that I've been noticing.
About a year ago, I was watching an episode of ABC's What Would You Do on a Friday. There was a segment dealing with homosexual couples and the public response to them openly showing affection for one another.
In one scenario, two gay men were showing off public displays of affection (or PDA) for one another while sitting on a public bench out in the open. While onlookers looked on, the couple snuggled, kissed, held hands, etc., etc. Nothing graphic. However many people looked on in disgust. One woman even called the police, and an officer came on to the scene and calmly told the couple to refrain from displaying any PDA. It turns out though, that the officer was aware of the scenario being for a show and was in on the whole thing. With all this happening to a gay male couple minding their own business, one would think that the same thing would happen to a lesbian couple. Not so fast....
In the scenario of the lesbian couple, while there were still people who looked on in disgust at their PDA, there were also men who looked on in interest. The segment even showed men approaching the couple and starting a conversation. In a few instances, the conversation leaned on the flirtatious side. Now let it be said that with the gay couple, they were also approached by a few women, but the conversation didn't appear to be flirtatious in any instance (unless women just have a different way of going about it). In fact, in one example, a woman seemed to be striking up a more supportive conversation, if you will. Something I didn't witness with the lesbian couple.
These differences in the interaction with couples such as these is the main point of this post, which is the observation of how society treats gay couples vs. lesbian couples.
All you have to do is to look at TV and movies to see how vastly different gays and lesbians are treated and viewed by society based on their sex. A lesbian couple is more often shown on TV, movies, music videos, etc. compared to gay couples. If one wants to incorporate sex into something and attract a male audience, then either a hot lesbian couple or simply how chicks making out. However, with a gay couple, showing them in media is seen as something more controversial than hot. Sometimes it seems almost like pulling teeth to simply show two guys kissing.
Take the kiss between Madonna and Britney Spears, then with Christine Aguilera on one of the past MTV awards. The media considered it hot. But with Adam Lambert kissing one the members of his band during a performance on TV, it was considered offensive, and too much. Why???
A common attribute that I notice is that these views and receptions seem to be "male-based", as in, beautiful looking lesbians or women making out are many times seen as hot to men, thus they are seen often in the media compared to handsome looking gays or men making out. Two men kissing are not seen as hot to men, hence you don't see those images often.
Now....why are the opinions and sexual turn-ons of the male audience the foremost concern? Do they believe that women aren't turned on by two men kissing (fanfiction and the internet in general disproves that idea lol)? Why is the media quick to show two beautiful women making out?
Here are bullets of other observations on this subject:
- Why do guys get seemingly "squeamish" when it come to gays, or go out there way in voicing how grossed out they are by it? I rarely see this reaction when it comes to women and lesbians. Is it because gayness is related to "weakness" and strength (or different forms of strength) is a known characteristic of masculinity ("be a man")?
- Why do people wonder about the sexuality of an actor who plays a homosexual in a movie, or on TV, but people aren't that concerned when it comes to actresses who play lesbians?
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