Lesbians are not real women, but are gay men real men?

I had a discussion with a young gentleman yesterday about a class we are in together. Specifically, we discussed an article by Wittig that argues that lesbians are not real women and that all women should become lesbians to remove the class distinction between men and women. Honestly, the details of that article are irrelevant to what is on my mind, but if you’re really curious about the article, let me know.

Anyway. So, I mentioned to him that I agree that lesbians are not women. Womanhood is a social construct and only in relation to men, so females who do not relate themselves to men are not women. During the conversation, the gentleman I was speaking with mentioned that it follows that gay men are not real men either.

At first, I agreed quickly. If lesbians are not women, gays are not men. However, I’ve been thinking about and I am unsure if that is a fair conclusion. Man is the absolute, the subject. Man is what is and woman is what is not. If man is the absolute, what makes one a man?

I have been so focused on what makes a one a woman that I seem to have entirely missed the question of what makes one a man. Since having a uterus does not make a woman, does it still follow that having a phallus does not make one a man? I imagine that it would be the embodiment of those male traits that women so aptly lack that makes one a man. But even this has its flaws given the assumption that man is the absolute. So which man? As man is the absolute, man is without flaw, does the actual nature of an individual man truly have anything to do with anything? While I have contended that manhood and womanhood are both social constructs rather than something biological and concrete, I have only argued for the sake of females as representing the “other”, the “negative”, and the “has not”. So then, what defines the “subject”, the positive”, and the “has”? Does the rule of lesbians being not women as they are not related to men follow that gays are not men as they do not relate to women? That seems to fail logically. Something that is positive is still positive whether a negative is presented or not. A hill is a hill even if there is no hole present. Perhaps that was a bad analogy. Moving on.

If men are both positive and neutral, and women are negative, then men do not require the identification of women to still be men. However, you cannot have a negative without the relation of a positive or neutral.

I pose that perhaps lesbians are not women as they are not related to the positive nature of men, this does not automatically mean that gay men are not men as a man does not need a woman to be a man. A woman, however, needs a man to be a real woman.

Every now and then I read something I’ve written and am shocked to find things that some would consider so against the female sex.

[Via http://bbrakhage.wordpress.com]