It’s also related that it comes from the same frame as we see from anti-gay right-wingers who can’t see the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia. They can’t see consent, or at least don’t value it as highly as your “position” in the “exchange”.

Like with many things, it ends up being used as projection which leads to them freaking out over the gays suddenly raping them or treating them like women or women rising up if they got rights and strapping-on and “returning the favor”. It’s essentially the same paranoid fervor of a Southern slave-owner slapping around the slaves because they “might rise up”.

I think Stacy’s dead wrong, by the way. “Getting fucked” wouldn’t have gained, and kept, the connotation of “getting the short end of the stick” if so many people didn’t see getting fucked as degrading, humiliating, etc. It carries over into many domains of thought and language that are still in everyday use, like the sexual double standard, the nervousness many straight men have about women who initiate sex, and so on, which are very old (see the book of Ezekiel and the Revelation, for example). And just because many straight boys have learned to pay lip service to equal rights for gays and to support gay marriage, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still homophobic. On the other hand, it isn’t fun for them either: the anxiety they have about not being man enough, of being cast out of the boys’ club or worse (which can include violence against their persons, not just mockery and ostracism), isn’t pleasant. It’s room 101: being thought gay/a penetrated man/a feminized man is the worst thing in the world, so they do their best to throw others into the path of danger.

…I’ll agree that “you’re gay” specifically has become such a mainstreamed insult that it’s lost a lot of its direct connection to homosexuality.

…what?

I completely missed that memo.

I’m pretty sure that’s the point in a nutshell. The problem which Lisa is referring to is the phenomenon in which men interpret getting fucked as something which lessens a person. This is self-evident in all the euphemisms so many men use to describe someone getting the best of them, or of them getting one over on someone else (screw you, take it in the ass, bitch, i’m going to make him/her bend over and take it, etc. etc.).

This is slightly off tangent, but it infuriates me to no end that “suck my cock” is used as an insult. Doing so degrades the act and turns it into a punishment instead of a pleasurable act. The same thing occurs with all the other bullshit euphemisms I mentioned above. By turning sexual acts with men into an insult, it makes it extremely difficult to enjoy engaging in a sex act with a man. I mean, really, do you really want to give a blowjob to someone who runs around saying “suck my cock” when he’s pissed off? Not a lot of logic there….

What’s interesting to me about the genesis of getting ‘screwed’ or ‘bent over’ and soforth as a term for, er, getting shafted (I wonder how many variants I could think of…) is how it references the power aspect. I can see your interpretation that it means “real men” give instead of getting; I’ve personally always thought of it more abstractly, as simply meaning that the other person – regardless of gender – got the better of you. Then again, I tend to overthink things too

As an aside, I stopped saying “that’s gay” many years ago after someone pointed out how directly it equates homosexuality with being wrong and stupid. I could imagine having the same outlook on saying “assraped” but for my interpretation that I described above, which seems to placate the couple of people who ever brought it up with me.

As far as “getting screwed,” that’s another version of my same point. The most emasculating thing that can happen to you is if somebody else forces sex on you, as it makes you a woman or a faggot. Real men are the performers, not the performees.