oppression is societal is pervasive

This text is largely compiled out of my earlier writings deep in an irrelevant thread. (If you are so inclined, you're free to look for it yourself.) Especially the beginning has been extended and adapted to make it stand on its own. The title previously was the "tl;dr" summary; i repurposed it because i cannot think of a better one right now.

An accusation that we are often confronted with is that we are "prejudiced" or "bigoted" ourselves; namely, against cissexual people, heterosexual people, or others with traits that happen to be the privileged norm. Although the norm in question is conceptually often interchangeable, the remainder of this piece addresses the accusation that we might be "prejudiced" against heterosexual people specifically. Words like "heterophobic" or "homosexist" have been coined in this context, and are claimed to be necessary in opposition to how we use the term heterosexist. (In my usage, the latter is synonymous with "homophobic", which i avoid for unrelated reasons.)

My response is that it is certainly possible to be literally "prejudiced" against heterosexual persons, but "homosexist" oppression doesn't exist if oppression is assumed to be prejudice+power. The power in question has to be relevant at a societal level; a specific form of oppression cannot exist only in one city or be caused by one employer's actions or such. At some point, a local occurrence would become irrelevant to the greater picture.

So oppression has to exist across a whole society. I have been asked to clarify what exactly i mean by "society" here. What would minimally qualify as one, and why does the definition of oppressive power require one? I think the actual necessity here is for the "power" to form sufficient influence over mass media as well as cultural norms, and hence have the resulting oppression inescapably encompass some space.

It's sort of a memetic thing. Am i heterosexist? Yes, certainly. I was brought up in a heterosexist, heteronormative culture; my very upbringing was imbued with messages of heterosexism; it is a part of my socialisation that i cannot simply shed by as little as one conscious decision to do so. It is a pervasive pattern of ideas that influences one's core thought processes.

I now continually do my best to not be (consciously) heterosexist any longer and to recognise when others call me out as slipping up, and react amicably to that. Nothing frees me of my challenge to continue monitoring myself for this residual heterosexism i myself exhibit, as long as i do, and that could quite certainly be for as long as i live.

The institutional nature of such thought is that i am not one "delusional" individual, but that the entire society: everyone (or virtually so) shares such elements of socialisation and is prone to act on them if they do not monitor them.

How this relates back to the power, as a requirement of institutional oppression, is that this definition of power simply requires heterosexuality and associated normative gender expression to be perceived as "the" norm with such a pervasiveness as it is in wide parts of a society (even if some attempt to reject it, consciously).

Is a society one 'state'? One nation? One continent? I think demanding exact definitions misses the point; though, often, one can find that a heteronormative society one finds oneself in might extend across the entire 'state', nation, and continent - if not wider. However, i believe the pervasiveness of the concept here is certainly one of its requirements.

If merely one employer forces, say, prejudice against heterosexuality onto their employees - let us assume, for the hypothetical, even onto their children as they attend the employer-provided pre-school, school, and higher education - as well as all media they consume that somehow relates to any of gender expression or romance or sexuality. Would this create oppression against heterosexual people? How large is this company supposed to be? Assuming it isn't the only employer around a certain place, why wouldn't people (heterosexual people in particular) choose to work for someone else? How would the children be forced to participate in this "culture", who would force the families altogether to never stray outside of the provided media, how and why should they not seek acquaintances from the broader culture outside? This analogy has become largely ridiculous. That's because it is. A single employer, given the current economy and law at least, simply cannot institute such a pervasive "culture" standing on its own, apart from a society's culture.

This is why for all such attempts in our societies, the dominant heteronorm would shine through, so to say. It is pervasive enough to permeate even this hypothetical "sub-culture". This is why today's "queer cultures" can hardly isolate one from the wider society in which they are embedded. They are not separated enough from it to provide that.

And this is why some arbitrarily-sized society is necessary to enable and uphold heterosexist oppression.