Homosexuality Is a Humiliation Fetish
In his book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, written with two clinical psychiatrists, René Girard developed a theory of homosexuality. Only one small section was dedicated to it, and the authors fenced their hypothesis with a claim that it accounts for “at least some of the types of homosexuality.” However, to me, their theory makes a whole load of sense, and I would hypothesize that it can be used as a basis for interpreting not only all homosexuality but all other sexual deviance.
In short, Girard stipulates that homosexuality arises when the sexual attention of the subject shifts from the opposite-sex object to the same-sex rival. It is essentially a result of sexual rivalry pushed to the extreme, and Girard states that “all sexual rivalry is structurally homosexual.” Furthermore, he associates the propensity to end up in this homosexual extreme to sadomasochism, or rather maso-sadism, as he redefines it, and which in turn he understands as an obsession with rivals-obstacles in general and a desire to experience their enchanting power either by getting tormented by them, or by tormenting someone else, respectively.
It is best that I demonstrate the theory with an example. It will be a dual example, as you will shortly see. Consider a young married couple, a man and a woman. First, let’s imagine that the guy is a domineering type. He likes to show off, and specifically, he likes to show off his wife to his guy friends. He wants to see them checking out his wife and he wants to see that little spark of envy in their eyes. He likes to get that sense of winning, of feeling like he’s better than the rest of them suckers. We would all agree that such behaviour, though perhaps not morally exemplary, would comfortably fit within the normie spectrum.
Now, consider a different type of guy as the husband. He is the insecure type. He is not very confident in himself and his choices, and he tends to seek validation from his peers. Therefore, he also wants his male friends to check out his wife and be attracted to her, to get a little envious. Preferably, he would want a male friend whom he considers a winner to play this role. The husband is not confident in his choice of women but figures that if his cooler friend thinks his wife is hot, he must have made a good choice. He, too, must be cool. Again, not an ideal situation, but very much commonplace.
Now, let’s turn the dynamics up a notch. The confident husband perhaps gets bored with the small and suppressed little signs of envy. They wear out for him, and his ego begins to demand something more. He may now actively seek situations in which he torments his rivals with envy. To this end, he manipulates his wife into dressing or acting seductively towards his male friends, or perhaps he takes her out to singles bars and watches random men hit on her, only so that he can have the pleasure of snatching her away at the last moment and watching the suckers burn with envy and humiliation. He gets off on the sense of dominance over and humiliation of other males.
How does this next level look for the insecure husband? His ego is likewise not getting enough nourishment from the tiny little hints of admiration he might see in the eyes of romantically successful men looking at his wife. Being insecure, he’s not even sure if those hints are real or if he might just be imagining them. So he manipulates his wife into situations similar to the domineering husband – situations in which she’s exposed to the advances of other males. He, too, snatches her at the last moment before they get their hands on her. But he gets off on something different than the domineering husband. He can never convince himself that he is better than his rivals. Remember, he selects specifically for the rivals he is convinced are better than him; otherwise, his strategy for validation would not work. Rather, he finds that the sense of being humiliated, the sense of comparing himself to the rivals and coming up short, somehow turns him on. It becomes part and parcel of his sexual stimulation.
When we take this triangular game to the next level of intensity, we can imagine that the two husbands will run into each other. They might begin to frequent swingers' parties. They might engage in the “hotwife” fetish, in which the insecure husband would play the role of a “cuck” getting off on having his wife sleep with a “bull,” the domineering third male. In such cases, it is the same pursuit of envy, jealousy, and humiliation that we had on that first, normie level, only now taken to a level of intensity and put into action in a way that is viewed as deviant. The two males are still getting off on humiliation, either humiliating or getting humiliated.
Now, think about what would be the final stage in this progression. What is the simplest and most direct way for one male to sexually humiliate another male while they both get off on it? Of course, it’s gay sex – assfucking, cocksucking. At this stage, the two men have arrived at the point where they can skip all the busywork involving the wife and the teasing charades and go straight for each other. Sexual attention has shifted entirely from the heterosexual object of rivalry, the wife, and now forms a direct line between the two rivals. The wife has disappeared from the picture, and homosexuality is no longer “structural” but carnal. The domineering husband has morphed into the top and the insecure husband into the bottom of their gay relationship.
Girard’s take on general sadomasochism adds another significant nuance to this theory. All desire is the desire for a higher being, and sadomasochism is the conviction that the higher being manifests itself through humiliation that it inflicts around itself. The role of the masochist is more fundamental than that of the sadist because the masochist subjects himself directly to humiliation to partake in transcendence. Humiliation is his sacrament. The sadist shares the worldview of the masochist regarding the nature and manifestation of transcendence, but he chooses to role-play the model-obstacle rather than experience him by directly subjecting himself to humiliation. We all know that the sadist is not a transcendental being, and from there we can understand that there is a fundamental theatricality to his domineering role. Mere mortal that he is, he must identify with the victim more than he could ever identify with some ephemeral higher being, some God of Humiliation. Thus, while the humiliator and the humiliated seem to play opposite and even antagonistic roles, they establish a deep emotional bond based on a shared vision of transcendence and reinforced through the act of humiliation itself.
Homosexual relationship as I described it above is an instance of a sadomasochistic relationship, as described above. By going through the example with progressive stages we saw how, structurally, or psychologically, it stems from a heterosexual rivalry that flares up and leads to a fetish for humiliation, pure and simple. The bond that binds the sexual roles of the top and the bottom is that they both share the same pursuit of transcendence through the act of sexual humiliation. It is in this shared vision of ecstasy through humiliation, if anywhere, that lies the true binding eros of homosexuality.
Finally, it is important to understand that the genesis of homosexuality does not necessarily involve the temporal progression from the normie stage, through wife-swapping, to straight homosexuality. The three stages that have been described in the story outline a sort of phylogenetic tree of various sexualities, of how they connect. How an individual ends up in the homosexual stage may vary greatly: it can happen all in one’s head, in pre-puberty perhaps, due to a traumatic imposition of rivalry, perhaps in the form of an overbearing older sibling or parent (footnote the “older brother” statistical phenomenon), perhaps in the form of childhood sexual molestation, etc. I can see it being genetically conditioned to a degree to, if we consider, for example, that some men are more likely to struggle with rivalry due to an effeminate body appearance, or whatever other biologically inheritable factor.
That said, considering the vast psychological momentum of desire, it stands to reason that the force that would change its trajectory ought to be very powerful. One can imagine a sudden blunt impact, as of two billiard balls, that would correspond to the early psychiatric intuition that sexual deviancy is caused by some traumatic event in early life. Or, one can imagine a powerful magnetic field that gradually but irresistibly curves the trajectory of a charged particle. This could correspond to any cultural or peer pressures or any ideological propaganda that gradually changes the target of the subject’s sexual appetite, as well as their sense of their own “sexual identity.”
Lesbianism
I used the examples of men, but what about lesbians? There is something to be said, perhaps, about the fact that the word homosexuality makes people’s minds jump to male homosexuality by default, while female homosexuality is given a separate term, lesbianism, and seems to be viewed as a different type of phenomenon. It must be said that many people find the eros of lesbianism less credible than that of male homosexuality.
Nevertheless, let’s talk about lesbianism. Let’s go through a thought experiment: repeat the whole example above, but reverse the gender roles, and consider how any biological differences between males and females might produce different reactions. I must admit, for the time being, that I have not dwelt on the lesbian version as much as on the male homosexual one, and that lesbian homosexuality is more distant from me as I’m not a woman.
But I believe that lesbianism is as closely tied in with sexual rivalry as male homosexuality. If we go with the assumption that lesbianism is not a default instinctual state, there must be a strong force, an obsession, to swing a woman’s sexuality from its default objects to its default rivals. Girard also confirms that the role of the rival is the same among men and women (Girard does not develop the idea of homosexuality as humiliation – this is my hypothesis). But what happens once rivalry gets inflamed? Is lesbianism also a humiliation fetish? I think that, perhaps, it’s not as much of a humiliation fetish as male homosexuality, but that humiliation does play a role.
To understand the difference between how male sexual rivalry leads to homosexuality and how female sexual rivalry leads to lesbianism, we must consider the asymmetry of males and females in the game of heterosexual seduction. Females are not the pursuers in this game. Males are used to open competition in many different aspects of life, not just romantic seduction, and it is the ups and downs of open competition that induce the emotional vertigo that can make men addicted to feelings of exhilarating victory or crushing humiliation. These feelings can then easily affect their sexuality. But women don’t compete openly with each other like men do. Female competition is indirect; both victory and defeat come in a roundabout way. In the game of sexual seduction, women are positioned as the prizes of the open competition, and victory to them means being selected, while defeat means being discarded.
Male desires and fears related to crushing or being crushed by rivals may lead to obsession with the rivals. With females, the desires and fears related to being selected over rivals or replaced by rivals may lead to obsession with rivals of a somewhat different kind. It could be argued that the chain of causation for the female case is somewhat more indirect: while men clash directly with each other while courting women, women compete indirectly as each of them attempts to create a court in which she is the centre of male attention.
Women never try to make their girlfriends chase their men, because the main boogeyman of female seduction strategy is the fear and worry that their man will discard her and pick the other woman. In other words, the main boogeyman of female sexual competition is jealousy, rather than envy, as it is with men. These two weaknesses are closely related but not quite the same. And humiliation comes into play here too; it is the potential humiliation of being discarded, of one’s court of suitors becoming desolate.
The female obsession with her rival that leads to lesbianism does not come from her desire to humiliate or be humiliated by her rival, but from making a pact with the rival: “Instead of risking one of us being rejected by men, let us choose each other, and reject men.” Thus, it appears to me that lesbianism is a way of neutralizing the possibility of humiliation at the hands of men by finding a female partner who is willing to join in this strategy. This explains why lesbians are notoriously dismissive of men, while homosexual men are most certainly not dismissive of women, but rather relish their company.
Lesbianism as a strategy for neutralizing the humiliation of rejection can take on many forms. With butch lesbians, it takes the form of replacing the masculine “selector” in his role. They may play out this role in a whole variety of ways, as loving equal partners, or as abusive husbands. Lesbian sexuality may exorcise the ghosts of humiliation and rejections through the whole spectrum of strategies, from strict avoidance of masculine “humiliation” to grotesque enactments of it. The lesbian bottom appears to retain the feminine role, but she is complicit with the top in their common rejection of male interest. Choosing a female “husband” is rebellion against the same thing as choosing to be a female husband.
Lesbianism seems to contain a narcissistic strategy. It is a rising above the possibility of humiliation at the hands of the aggressive sex by pairing with the gentle sex. Lesbianism as a narcissistic strategy might also explain the phenomenon of lesbians-until-graduation – the LUGS – women who signal transcendence over men only to increase their value in men’s eyes. Though less obviously involved in the sexual act itself, humiliation plays a key role in lesbianism as well as male homosexuality.
Some Quantum Mechanics of the Rainbow Spectrum
It staggers the mind to think how the theory that I laid out above accounts for so many observable phenomena related to homosexuality. But despite its undeniable explanatory power, the theory is ignored by today’s academia. So let’s look at some of these related phenomena ourselves.
To begin with, the continuity between normie rivalry, swingers, cucks, bulls, wife swappers, etc., and plain-vanilla homosexuals can be deduced from the fact that many men involved in the first group of activities often turn out to be gay, or come out of the closet at some point, and even if they don’t come out, exhibit plain homoerotic traits. Rather than seeing a spectrum, the way we are expected to react is to be surprised and fascinated at the adjacency of all these supposedly ontological sexual preferences.
A cursory glance at the gay internet will reveal the massive role that sexual sadomasochism plays in gay eroticism. The role is so big that a casual observer may wonder if homosexuality can exist without sadomasochism. According to our theory, it can’t. As I was doing research for this essay, I was amused to discover an ongoing debate among gay men around the morality of widespread and often excessive humiliation play in gay eroticism. As though gay eroticism was anything other than humiliation play.
I’ve heard it said that “bisexuals are liars.” I don’t think they are liars, but I do think that bisexuality is not yet another ontologically independent sexuality. A bisexual is simply someone who’s stuck between the inflamed-rivalry heterosexual stage and full-blown homosexuality.
There are stories of heterosexual men who after scaling the highest peaks of sexual conquest turn homosexual. This is often dismissed as an urban legend, but some research will show that it truly happens often enough. We can understand why this happens once we understand that homosexuality arises out of inflamed sexual rivalry. The hypergamous heterosexual male is driven into his conquests by a desire to arouse envy in the eyes of his rivals. But once he has defeated all his rivals and climbed to the top, this desire can no longer be fulfilled – the rivals are left too far below. If he continues clinging on to this obsession with the rival, the only thing left for him to do after he has scaled the heterosexual Everest is to start climbing the homosexual Everest – to do away with all the women and engage in direct sexual contact with his rivals.
Queer people often boast that their sexuality is more emotionally advanced and nuanced than plain old normie heterosexuality, which they view as boring and parochial. This squares up with the idea that homosexuality arises out of heterosexual rivalry that has heated up and advanced beyond ordinary levels. Obsession with the rival, like all obsessions, fills the mind with extreme nuance and passion.
Our theory would predict that the prevalence of homosexuality should correlate to the intensity of sexual competition in a society. The latter, in turn, would correlate to the level of sexual market openness, or liberalism in general. Correlation does not mean causation, but we see that with the increase in sexual market liberation, and intensification of sexual competition brought about by social media, we also see an unprecedented increase in young people identifying as LGBTQ+. Putting aside copycat effects, some of the increase in queerness may be purely due to increase in sexual rivalry. Even in pre-modern societies, ritualised homosexuality seems to pop up in cultures that appear to have had a cultural and artistic focus on courting or sexuality. Consider, for example, Classical Greece, where seemingly institutionalised homosexuality was concurrent with statuary arts obsessing with the nude body. Progressives would, of course, argue that liberal cultures allow homosexuality to express itself, but what if liberalism causes homosexuality by causing sexual rivalries to proliferate and intensify?
The rainbow flag is a very apt symbol of the LGBTQ+ movement. There are infinitely many colours in the single, continuous spectrum of the rainbow, and it is impossible to find the line where one ends and another begins. The perception of finite distinct colours arises from how biological systems in the human body, specifically the eye and the brain, process visible electromagnetic waves of continuously varying frequencies (yes, I know it’s actually quantum and not perfectly continuous, but quantum leaps are negligibly small). Likewise, all sexuality exists on the same spectrum, and there are no clear borders between one sexual deviancy and another. In this case, the cutoff boundaries don’t even exist in the psyche of subjects, but rather in their “lifestyle,” in how they choose to act upon their sexual urges.
The idea that the role of the bottom is more fundamental than the role of the top corresponds to the widespread notion that to be gay either way is essentially to be a bottom, a “fag.” Though some gays are more or less fixed as tops, and though gay couples may swap their roles, the home base role for every homosexual is seen as the role of a man who subjects himself to humiliation, rather than humiliates others. By extension, men who don’t identify as homosexual but who like to play the domineering Don Juan or bull are not truly secure in their masculinity; they think that true masculinity is expressed through humiliation, and this must be because at some point they have felt to be on the receiving end of that humiliation. Don Juanism, hypergamy, and fantasies of dominance are all adjacent to homosexuality.
The whole slew of accusations from queer people of patriarchy being aggressive, humiliating, and “rapey” appears as a case of projection in light of our theory. The accusers are people sexually aroused by humiliation. Just like heterosexuals struggle to put themselves in the shoes of homosexuals, homosexuals and other queers struggle to conceive of a sexuality that is not based on humiliation.
The LGBTQ+ community labelling their parades as PRIDE and talking ceaselessly about pride appears as an obvious way to cope with the plain fact that never ceases to confront them in their sexual lives; i.e. that their sexuality is a fetish of humiliation, which is the opposite of pride.
Countless great novelists, including Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Proust, have arrived at an intuitive understanding that “heterosexual rivalry is structurally homosexual,” and even if not writing about homosexuals explicitly, but only about intense triangular rivalry between heterosexual rivals, they have been suspected of being “latent” homosexuals, these suspicions starting with Freud and spreading to countless pundits today.
Our theory explains the universal condemnation of homosexuality among traditional cultures. Mimetic theory allows us to see that the unifying purpose of all traditional morals – of rules and prohibitions – is to stem mimetic crises. It also shows us that mimetic crises are caused by unrestrained and runaway desires. Tradition intuitively grasps that homosexuality is runaway sexuality. The same intuition condemns unrestrained and runaway heterosexuality, and all other runaway desires, for the same reason.
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