Reply #56: My reasoning is thus; [View All]

Both homophobia and misogyny share a common root, the ideology of gender roles. Men must act one way, women act another, and the two should not overlap, basically. Our society is male-dominated (and to my knowledge, there's never been a female-dominated one, though there have been a good number of egalitarian ones) and as a result, the gender role of women is seen as "lesser" and all the way out to "bad" - take a look at the major world religions, from Christianity to Buddhism. All of them agree that the nature of woman is inherently tainted with sin, or evil, or what have you, and they have treated women as such.

Gay people "muddy the waters" on this. They don't fit neatly into gender roles, and as such are threatening to the people who believe such things. Lesbians are "defiant" for daring to live their lives without sex with men, and are generally assumed to be virulently anti-male, butch, angry (unless they're doing porn, then their only problem is that they need a penis to play with, apparently). Gay men are seen as "womanly" which is basically treason, to the male-dominated gender role ideology. Female homophobes see them as weak and ineffective at being men, as well.

if I were to do a misogyny / homophobia Venn diagram I imagine the two would have an awful lot of overlap. Not perfect overlap, of course, but they'd be definitely related.