you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Q-Continuum-kin 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think part of it is rooted in old school sexism honestly. It's the othering of women from society. It's like the way "actor" is gender neutral. Men and women can be actors but it used to be assumed that men worked while women were back home barefoot and pregnant. So there's the special delineation to call out a female actor as an actress.

If you think about how society treated gays it was always negativity aimed at men who were failing at their gender. Go all the way back to biblical stories and you have teachings about how not to act with other men and about how the desires of women were completely ignored. They were expected to give men sex whenever the man wanted. It would have been a joke to ask what the woman wanted.

Marital rape wasn't even recognized until very recently in history.

So in terms of gays, at some point society had to recognize that gay women also existed and so they got perceived as some other thing.