masculine women, effeminate males

When I play The Sims, for instance, I often let the women do the wooing, and it tickles me no end to see the male being wooed put his hand to his forehead, swoon slightly, and giggle in response while my female seducer, down on one knee, serenades his pretty self. But like that commercial for the guy in his wife’s slip, there is no template for that, is there? It’s like us genderqueer hets simply don’t exist.

-- helenboyd, a truly Heterosexual woman.

A typical heterosexual male's sexual and gender orientation ...

Sexually, I have never been attracted to ‘a man presenting as a man’ and think I would run a mile if I had discovered a penis in any one else’s knickers but my own. Similarly (or is that conversely) FTMs are (to me, and please, I would not say this to them) sexually attractive. In fact I find muscular, athletic females, and those frequently described as ‘butch dikes’ more often than not attractive too. Now the awkward bit… so are some transwomen – at least from the very limited views available on their own sites. I have no idea how I would react if I met them. . .

Liking men was not Queer in Europe in the days of Oscar Wilde

For 14 years, from his student days at Oxford until the trials in 1895, Wilde camped it up outrageously, first as an effeminate aesthete, then as an effeminate dandy. Yet he was regarded by society, the press and the public, as rather wicked; by no means as a pariah. It was only in late 1894, only a few months before the trials, that serious rumours about his private life and habits became persistent.

-- The Wilde Way of Setting Up Camp
The Irish Times, November 21, 2000
Alan Sinfield

The writer goes on to explain that in those days, effeminacy was just not associated with a sexual desire for males. Of course, they associated effeminacy with third sex, that is transgendered males who sought receptive sex from men, but it was just as well associated with 'heterosexuality'.

It is clear that this association between effeminacy and a 'desire for men' has been carefully and artifically socally engineered by the forces of Heterosexualization in order to discourage men from indulging in it.

Redefining Third Gender in terms of 'homosexuality'

Evidence that in the eighteenth century there were deliberate attempts in the West to define the femininity of the third sex in terms of a "sexual desire for sodomy" per se, without differentiating between masculinity and femininity and without differentiating between the penetrator and the penetrated.

"...  the word "sodomy" seems to have a rather broader meaning, i.e. sex of any sort between males. Indeed,  in Cocker's English dictionary of 1724 sodomy is defined simply as "male venery", which is really as abstract as the modern synonym "male homosexuality". Incidentally, the word "catamite" is sometimes just a synonym for "sodomite", and was not always restricted to one who submits to sodomy. There are also some other surprises. For example, the word "molly" appeared in a Swedish/English dictionary in 1762, where it is simply defined as a sodomite, a buggerer, without effeminate connotations."

-- excerpted from: Homosexual Terms in 18th-century Dictionaries

Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England

A sourcebook compiled by Rictor Norton