Since starting this blog, I've spent a lot of time wading through the sex/sexuality blogosphere. Anyone who's done this knows that it can be a mixed bag. Mixed bag may be too kind. There are more dicks hanging out than Chat Roulette. There are fascinating accounts of people's sexual lives. There are the hotwives, the cuckolds, the BDSM lifestylers, closet-cases, swingers, adult babies, hedonists, and cheaters. The whole lot form a fascinating tapestry of the complex modern sexual world.
Sometimes, you find yourself reading a blog because it's so well-written or interesting that you simply can't stop. Other times, you throw the bullshit flag and move on, realizing quickly that the person is making up a life to appear cool to the other sex bloggers. And then there are the ones that have you aghast because of the sheer awfulness of what is unfolding.
The cheaters often fall into the latter category. In nearly every cheating blog, the rationalization post is near the beginning. It's always a "don't judge me because of my actions" post. Usually those posts are gentle. Dear Husband (DH) likes sex less than I do. Dear Wife (DW) lost interest in sex after our twins were born. In some cases, though, the rationalization post is so full of nastiness and vitriol, it can't be contained in a single post. In those cases, there are typically multiple posts containing jabs at the spouse.
One of the most appalling spent more than two years tearing down her spouse. When he discovered the blog, he was upset. The blogger then decided to use it to attack her husband for not being man enough to fight for her but railing about him trying to keep an eye on her activities. Another initiated a tirade about how she's such a giver and her husband craves her attention that she looks for men just willing to pay attention to her. The post was buttressed by dozens of accounts of selfish lovers slipping in through the back door of her house to get blow jobs and then slipping out. One claimed his wife didn't like sex, and later added that the reason he cheated was that their sex life went downhill after she was diagnosed with cancer and failed to account for his sexual needs.
Many cited a spouse who traveled too much for work as a reason for cheating. One, after several affairs complained that her spouse was just not motivated like the "alpha males" she was fucking and convinced him to start his own company, which took up much of his time, that she used to justify sleeping with even more guys.
I had originally intended to put links in this post, but I started it just over a year ago. Since then, nearly all of the ones referenced have gone dormant or disappeared. A few hinted that their divorce attorneys wanted them stopped. Others referenced getting caught. These blogs seem to have a lifespan of about 18 months. New ones are always cropping up, so anyone seeking to wallow I as did should mosey over to Google. New infidelity blogs seem to crop up just as fast as they collapse, so there's no rush.
What ultimately amazes me is that so many of these cheating blogs are so short-lived, and yet, many more get added. It's one thing to fuck around on a partner. It happens. Life is messy. To create an on-line persona around it and document at length how inadequate your partner is in comparison with your lovers is something else entirely. It's the deepest hurt one can add. Piling on cheap justification doesn't make it better; it only makes it more selfish. In the mean time, these blogs get discovered and the lawyers get involved. Is there any good in it all?
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
10/25/11
8/10/10
Fetlife is the reason I can't have nice things.
Yo, it's been a while since I've posted. Big changes around these parts, and I've been busy moving house (twice, don't ask), restructuring my relationship, sending my novel to agents, and vanilla blogging for pay. Life happens!
However, today I have rants. Yes I do.
Fetlife, for the uninitiated is like Facebook for perverts. It's facebook with no fucking superego. You think Facebook status updates are TMI? Wait until you find out that someone you once hooked up with is in the Bestiality forums looking for a Great Dane for fun times. And for all the hawt 'n sexy gonzo porn people post, there's also castration pics and various stuff that you wish you NEVER FUCKING SAW and will never get out of your mind again.
Kinky people are by nature, drama queens. Hence there is a lot of wank on Fetlife, and I try to keep my presence on there to a minimum so I don't claw my eyes out. Hence, I share with you some of my biggest fucking pet peeves:
1. Trophy pics
I used to take/distribute nude photos in my early twenties. A lot of this had to do with losing a bunch of weight, buying my first digital camera, being young and sort of naive, and living in a place where I didn't have a lot of dating options, so I got a lot of my jollies by swapping dirty pics with strangers. I've also been in several relationships with "artists" where creative nude or semi nude pics and video were taken with artistic intent- and in one case, used to try slut shame me by a mentally disturbed ex, who posted them to facebook.
Here's the thing- I am comfortable with my body, being nude, and being seen nude. I am not comfortable with third parties exploiting that for their own ends.
A lot of wannabe playboys on Fetlifes post scores of pictures of their conquests- explicit and often humiliating (and potentially life destroying, considering that Fetlife has extremely lax privacy settings) pictures of women they've fucked. If these women have given their explicit consent to post these pictures, that's they're business. I suspect, a lot of the time, they haven't, and that's just creepy and gross, and a violation.
Hence, I don't share my nude pics anymore, and I don't post nude pics to Fetlife. Not worth the risk.
2. The castigation of young male dominants
The BDSM scene has a disturbing amount in common with Fundamentalist Mormonism in a particular regard- many older male dominants feel entitled to a stable of young, nubile subs, and make a practice of alienating and humiliating younger male dominants, rather than mentoring and supporting them. It's classic jockeying for alpha male status- the younger men present a threat to their privilege, so they virtually stomp on them in forums, or spread rumors about them in the scene instead of presenting direct feedback.
The usual arguments given are that young (typically anyone under the age of 30) Doms are never experienced enough, they lack introspection, they're only looking to get laid, they don't understand the rules of the scene, yadda yadda etc. and therefore do not have the right to call themselves dominants. You know what? I've met plenty of men in their 30s, 40s and 50s who also have these problems. And for some reason, these arguments don't apply to the 18 year old subs these older dominants favor, or the young female pro-dommes who frequently trade on their youth and looks as much as their topping skills to attract clients.
One of the hands-down best Doms I've ever played with, and whom I am still friends with to this day, is only 24 years old. He was twenty one (and I was twenty seven) when we were dating. His play was hot, inventive, safe, sane, and not bogged down by a lot of protocol and bullshit. The idea that it is automatically "safer" to play with an older Dom needs to be called out for the bullshit that it is, and people should evaluate who they play with on a case-by-case basis.
3. The stigmatization of monogamy
For some reason, it seems that within the kinky and queer scenes, monogamy has fallen out of fashion. I suspect a lot of folks spent their formative years in dysfunctional monogamous relationships and have idealized polyamory beyond what is necessarily realistic. Being raised in a progressive city, I had the inverse experience of having many early dysfunctional poly experiences and coming to the conclusion that it's no longer a style that works for me. I am hardly a traditional monogamist- I have no problem with my partner viewing porn or flirting, playing publicly with a partner, or even playing with others within clearly defined boundaries after a relationship has been deeply established, but the idea of dating free-for-all and multiple emotional entanglements does not appeal to me at this point. And for that, I am told I am somehow not emotionally evolved, despite the fact that I have been through all kinds of experiences. That my desire to form a deep bond with one individual instead of hopping from honeymoon period to honeymoon period and spreading myself across several people makes me somehow jealous and possessive. I know myself well enough to understand that a monogamous relationship with a vanilla person would never in a million years wouldn't work for me, and there is something of an assumption that if you want monogamy in a kinky context, you want to be in some sort of codependent 24/7 power exchange situation. Is it possible to desire a monogamous relationship with a man, as a woman, but still be kinky and queer identified? It's amazing how narrow minded unconventional people can be.
And if I have to hear one more argument about evolutionary biology that monogamy is inherently doomed, I will cut a bitch.
4. Vultures
This is a more specific complaint about Facebook, though it has a degree of gravity on Fetlife as well.
Ok, I will say up front- I am sure there are male vultures as well, but as I am a mostly straight female, I wouldn't know. The vultures I have dealt with have been by and large young, insecure women.
The Vulture's express purpose in life is to try to sabotage your budding monogamous relationship with someone new, and to come around and scavenge your relationship carrion post-breakup. Sometimes they're your partners ex, sometimes they're a person who wasn't interested in dating your partner until competition presented itself, sometimes it's a "friend" that your partner isn't interested in dating and feels bitter as a result. It's icky and I don't know why these individuals choose to prey on other people's relationships instead of ya know, finding their own. The vulture existed prior to social networking sites, but Facebook has made their shady M.O. a whole lot easier.
Classic vulture tactics? Posting old pictures of themselves with your partner and tagging them to make it look like they have "something going on." Constant, thinly veiled "harmless" but creepy flirtatious comments left on your partner's wall. In a recent relationship I basically stopped looking at my partner's wall altogether because the vulture infestation was so bad, and he was unwilling to acknowledge why this creepy shit made me uncomfortable, dismissing it as jealousy (and to be fair, a lot of people like this attention and are unwilling to set clear boundaries). The only problem is, sometimes the exact same shit happens when you're been legitimately cheated on and lied to, and being told it's "jealousy" is a diversion tactic.
One girl in particular felt the need to personally comment on anything I wrote on my partner's wall, as if we were involved in some non-consensual facebook threeway. The vulture's goal is to plant seeds of doubt in the hopes of breaking you up. It's shitty and unethical. Would you walk up to someone in a monogamous relationship and openly hit on them in front of their partner?
Facebook is basically poison for relationships and it's entirely likely that I will choose NOT to be facebook friends with future partners for this very reason. Who needs this drama?
The moral of this story? I should spend less time on the internet.
However, today I have rants. Yes I do.
Fetlife, for the uninitiated is like Facebook for perverts. It's facebook with no fucking superego. You think Facebook status updates are TMI? Wait until you find out that someone you once hooked up with is in the Bestiality forums looking for a Great Dane for fun times. And for all the hawt 'n sexy gonzo porn people post, there's also castration pics and various stuff that you wish you NEVER FUCKING SAW and will never get out of your mind again.
Kinky people are by nature, drama queens. Hence there is a lot of wank on Fetlife, and I try to keep my presence on there to a minimum so I don't claw my eyes out. Hence, I share with you some of my biggest fucking pet peeves:
1. Trophy pics
I used to take/distribute nude photos in my early twenties. A lot of this had to do with losing a bunch of weight, buying my first digital camera, being young and sort of naive, and living in a place where I didn't have a lot of dating options, so I got a lot of my jollies by swapping dirty pics with strangers. I've also been in several relationships with "artists" where creative nude or semi nude pics and video were taken with artistic intent- and in one case, used to try slut shame me by a mentally disturbed ex, who posted them to facebook.
Here's the thing- I am comfortable with my body, being nude, and being seen nude. I am not comfortable with third parties exploiting that for their own ends.
A lot of wannabe playboys on Fetlifes post scores of pictures of their conquests- explicit and often humiliating (and potentially life destroying, considering that Fetlife has extremely lax privacy settings) pictures of women they've fucked. If these women have given their explicit consent to post these pictures, that's they're business. I suspect, a lot of the time, they haven't, and that's just creepy and gross, and a violation.
Hence, I don't share my nude pics anymore, and I don't post nude pics to Fetlife. Not worth the risk.
2. The castigation of young male dominants
The BDSM scene has a disturbing amount in common with Fundamentalist Mormonism in a particular regard- many older male dominants feel entitled to a stable of young, nubile subs, and make a practice of alienating and humiliating younger male dominants, rather than mentoring and supporting them. It's classic jockeying for alpha male status- the younger men present a threat to their privilege, so they virtually stomp on them in forums, or spread rumors about them in the scene instead of presenting direct feedback.
The usual arguments given are that young (typically anyone under the age of 30) Doms are never experienced enough, they lack introspection, they're only looking to get laid, they don't understand the rules of the scene, yadda yadda etc. and therefore do not have the right to call themselves dominants. You know what? I've met plenty of men in their 30s, 40s and 50s who also have these problems. And for some reason, these arguments don't apply to the 18 year old subs these older dominants favor, or the young female pro-dommes who frequently trade on their youth and looks as much as their topping skills to attract clients.
One of the hands-down best Doms I've ever played with, and whom I am still friends with to this day, is only 24 years old. He was twenty one (and I was twenty seven) when we were dating. His play was hot, inventive, safe, sane, and not bogged down by a lot of protocol and bullshit. The idea that it is automatically "safer" to play with an older Dom needs to be called out for the bullshit that it is, and people should evaluate who they play with on a case-by-case basis.
3. The stigmatization of monogamy
For some reason, it seems that within the kinky and queer scenes, monogamy has fallen out of fashion. I suspect a lot of folks spent their formative years in dysfunctional monogamous relationships and have idealized polyamory beyond what is necessarily realistic. Being raised in a progressive city, I had the inverse experience of having many early dysfunctional poly experiences and coming to the conclusion that it's no longer a style that works for me. I am hardly a traditional monogamist- I have no problem with my partner viewing porn or flirting, playing publicly with a partner, or even playing with others within clearly defined boundaries after a relationship has been deeply established, but the idea of dating free-for-all and multiple emotional entanglements does not appeal to me at this point. And for that, I am told I am somehow not emotionally evolved, despite the fact that I have been through all kinds of experiences. That my desire to form a deep bond with one individual instead of hopping from honeymoon period to honeymoon period and spreading myself across several people makes me somehow jealous and possessive. I know myself well enough to understand that a monogamous relationship with a vanilla person would never in a million years wouldn't work for me, and there is something of an assumption that if you want monogamy in a kinky context, you want to be in some sort of codependent 24/7 power exchange situation. Is it possible to desire a monogamous relationship with a man, as a woman, but still be kinky and queer identified? It's amazing how narrow minded unconventional people can be.
And if I have to hear one more argument about evolutionary biology that monogamy is inherently doomed, I will cut a bitch.
4. Vultures
This is a more specific complaint about Facebook, though it has a degree of gravity on Fetlife as well.
Ok, I will say up front- I am sure there are male vultures as well, but as I am a mostly straight female, I wouldn't know. The vultures I have dealt with have been by and large young, insecure women.
The Vulture's express purpose in life is to try to sabotage your budding monogamous relationship with someone new, and to come around and scavenge your relationship carrion post-breakup. Sometimes they're your partners ex, sometimes they're a person who wasn't interested in dating your partner until competition presented itself, sometimes it's a "friend" that your partner isn't interested in dating and feels bitter as a result. It's icky and I don't know why these individuals choose to prey on other people's relationships instead of ya know, finding their own. The vulture existed prior to social networking sites, but Facebook has made their shady M.O. a whole lot easier.
Classic vulture tactics? Posting old pictures of themselves with your partner and tagging them to make it look like they have "something going on." Constant, thinly veiled "harmless" but creepy flirtatious comments left on your partner's wall. In a recent relationship I basically stopped looking at my partner's wall altogether because the vulture infestation was so bad, and he was unwilling to acknowledge why this creepy shit made me uncomfortable, dismissing it as jealousy (and to be fair, a lot of people like this attention and are unwilling to set clear boundaries). The only problem is, sometimes the exact same shit happens when you're been legitimately cheated on and lied to, and being told it's "jealousy" is a diversion tactic.
One girl in particular felt the need to personally comment on anything I wrote on my partner's wall, as if we were involved in some non-consensual facebook threeway. The vulture's goal is to plant seeds of doubt in the hopes of breaking you up. It's shitty and unethical. Would you walk up to someone in a monogamous relationship and openly hit on them in front of their partner?
Facebook is basically poison for relationships and it's entirely likely that I will choose NOT to be facebook friends with future partners for this very reason. Who needs this drama?
The moral of this story? I should spend less time on the internet.
5/21/10
Jezebel turns three (but is it worth reading anymore?)
Jezebel, Gawker's "feminist" blog turns three today.
Former editor Maureen (Moe) Tkacik also provided the well-timed cover story for this month's Columbia Journalism Review, regarding the navelgazing hybrid of journalism and blogging that seems to be the fate of modern media (it's kind of TL;DR but I actually did read the whole thing and loved it. It explained a lot about why I ultimately walked away from journalism as a female writer in my 20s and haven't looked back since.)
And most importantly in this string of fateful events, I got promoted to a Gawker "starred commenter" after several years of commenting on Jezebel, a privilege that I'm not sure if I should be more proud or ashamed of.
Moe's article provided a lot of interesting insight to Jezebel:
"2007, I took a job at Gawker Media helping launch a sister blog targeted at Gawker’s demographically attractive female readership—a property that was named Jezebel, at the insistence of Gawker CEO and founder Nick Denton and against my vociferous objections, after the blasphemous Old Testament whore who was eventually eaten alive by dogs."
and
"For most of my time there, bloggers earned bonuses that were tied to the page views their posts received, so the leisurely three minutes required to download a haggard image of Amy Winehouse from a celebrity photo agency and post it with a five-word caption was rewarded as generously as the frenzied hour and a half spent compiling the daily roundup of celebrity gossip, and at least twice as generously as anything I actually wanted to spend an hour and a half writing about."
That would explain the glut of "filler" that the site suffers from- celebrity tweets, cute animal pics, reposts from tabloids, lazy re-hashes of articles written better elsewhere.
I read Jezebel to kill time at work, I don't read it because I think it actually offers that much of substance at this point. And while it boasts its fair share of feminist indignation, it's 90% fluff that I'd probably ignore if I wasn't bored at my office job.
I actually got into reading Jezebel through editor Tracie Egan's blog One D at a Time, which appears to have gone AWOL since Tracie got married and promoted to Senior Writer (though the majority of her "writing" at this point reposts of celebrity tweets and clips from trashy TV shows, which is a shame because she's an awesome writer. But it all goes back to page views=dollars, and that's what's easy and gets hits.)
Back in the day, Tracie(then a staffer at Jezebel's underpaid paper analog BUST) wrote One D at A Time under the moniker "Slutmachine." Slutmachine was like an X rated Williamsburg version of Chelsea Handler- coked out, shamelessly promiscuous and snarky, the crazy friend we all like to live vicariously through. She reminded me a lot of myself- we were the same age and we both had a lot of weird sex and wrote about it, except she was making a lot more money than I was at what I then considered to be my dream job. She took impressive risks as a writer, and it paid off. She wrote about having herpes and why this is wrongfully stigmatized (which is fucking brave, in my opinion.) She and another Jez blogger took secret video at American Apparel of them trying on skanky outfits in what is possibly the greatest Jezebel post ever. Her piece de resistance was an essay she wrote for Vice about paying a male hooker to fake rape her- it's shocking, hilarious and brilliant. Pictures appeared on Jezebel of her getting out of a car sporting a giant fake bush, and re-enacting the Lindsay Lohan knife play photos with other Jezebel staffers in her kitchen. It didn't hurt that she was a gorgeous brunette with huge boobs and amazing fashion sense either. OTOH, she also posted various and sundry fat-phobic and uptight/conventional shit that made me like her a lot less (loosely quoted via Pot Psychology:"I'd rather fuck a fat dude than a dude in a kilt." I'm sorry, that's just weak.)
And then, in her coup de grace, she got got married, retired the Slutmachine moniker, got rid of One D at a Time, and now posts reality TV clips to Jezebel in lieu of, ya know, actual content.
I totally understand and respect why Tracie retired the Slutmachine persona, putting one's scandalous personal life in the public domain has the potential to really fuck up your life. And now she's married and (presumably) monogamous, which changes everything. I hope she's happy, but I do feel a weird sense of loss as fan.
I keep reading Jezebel because I hope that someday it'll be what it once was- sloppy and occasionally gross, brave, and funny, but instead I find another sterile fashion roundup or debate on potential photoshopping of Blake Lively's boobs.
This is what feminism looks like? I want my money back.
5/20/10
OKCupid has jumped the shark, for realz.
For years OKCupid has been my go-to dating site for several reasons: it's free, it (used to) attract unconventional, geeky people who were still fuckable, it wasn't exceedingly meat markety, it doesn't have a Christian agenda, there were funny quizzes, you didn't have to answer a bunch of stupid questions unless you wanted to.
Via OKCupid, I met a couple decent fuckbuddies (several of whom I'm still on good terms with), various and sundry assholes, a flat out terrible boyfriend, and even a friend or three. The site did facilitate me hooking up with current BF even if it wasn't how we met. I've used the dating styles quiz as a litmus test for where I was at WRT dating at various points in my life. All in all, OkCupid has served me well enough in the past.
The thing is, it's gone downhill recently. It's possible that as I enter my thirties and get pickier, I'm aging out of the OKC demographic. But here's the thing- ten years ago, online dating was stigmatized by the general public which meant the people who did it were either totally undateable, or else kind of weird but awesome (I prefer to view myself as an early adopter in the latter category). But somewhere along the line, assholes realized it was an easy way to get laid. (I briefly dated a fat dude with a neckbeard who confessed over beers that "he no longer thinks he could be in a committed relationship since it's so easy for him to get laid with online dating." Just, EW.) And a lot of people don't understand online dating netiquette, so the site is now flooded with profiles of assholes in Naperville who only post one photo, don't fill out their profile, don't read my profile, and send me messages that say "Yo."
I've put up and taken down profiles maybe 5 or 6 times as successes and frustrations with the site have waxed and waned. However, a friend of mine posted something they sent her on her Facebook today that annoyed the shit out of me:
"We are very pleased to report that you are in the top half of OkCupid's most attractive users. [. . .] Your new elite status comes with one important privilege:... You will now see more attractive people in your match results.[. . .] Suddenly, the world is your oyster. And, no, we didn't just send this email to everyone on OkCupid. Go ask an ugly friend and see."
Ok, so what is this shit? (and yes, I'm one of her "ugly friends" apparently.) This strikes me as so petty, so ick, and so unlike what I thought OKCupid stood for, as a weirdo-friendly dating site. There's already a "beautiful people" dating site that boots members if they gain 5 pounds, and while attractiveness is important, it's also highly subjective. While I agree that said friend is lovely, rewarding members as with "elite" privilege on the basis of conventional attractiveness strikes me as petty and alienating to the majority of users.
It makes me feel like, at the end of the day, high school oppression mentality is still lurking everywhere. Anyone have any suggestions for dating sites that are free and don't suck?
5/13/10
Biphobia: Real and Relevant
"...For homo and hetero define themselves as opposites, however social science instruments like the Kinsey scale and the Klein grid keep demonstrating that purity is a cultural artifact. And identity politics as well as science has an interest in keeping them opposite. To add "bisexuality" as a third category here is not in fact to refine the terms of analysis but instead to expose the radical limitations of rights-based arguments when linked to a concept of fixed identity." - Marjorie Garber, "Bisexuality: The Eroticism of Everyday Life"
There was a recent discussion in a friend's blog in which a lot of people understandably lambasted bisexual activist Kyle Schickner's "report" (I use this term loosely) about the lack of bi visibility at the 2010 GLAAAD awards in Los Angeles. The article, in addition to being poorly written, had some problems, notably his description of trans folk as having "leapfrogged from the bottom rung of the queer community past bisexuals by developing a community and iconic celebrities." The mainstream LGTBQ movement is at best dismissive of, and at worst, actively hostile and transphobic to trans people, and to set up this false dichotomy of trans versus bi (ignoring the many bi people who are trans). This can best be described as playing the "oppression olympics," and unfortunately colored what otherwise was a very fair point: that bi visibility has been significantly reduced since the 1990s, and that this is due to many factors, the most significant of which is a lack of a cohesive, political bisexual community within the LGTBQ movement.
But as the comments over Schickner's piece raged on, it became clear that many people who are queer or queer allies were incredibly dismissive over whether biphobia even exists, or whether bi activism is necessary or valid. The reasoning being that if one is visibly bisexual then the only oppression one experiences is homophobia And if one is not visibly bisexual (the assumption being that someone in a "heterosexual" pairing cannot be visibly bisexual, which is problematic in and of itself) then that person receives straight privilege, thus invalidating the concept of biphobia.
The argument goes that gay and lesbians, being part of an oppressed group, cannot have any institutional power over a privileged group - bisexuals being assumed to generally fall into the latter. And yet when you have examples like a self-described LGTBQ sports organization actively discriminating against bi people for "not being gay enough," it makes me wonder if the traditional model of privilege becomes too simplistic when talking about issues within queer communities. It seems that this is an area where a model based on intersectionality would be a more functional way of analyzing these issues as opposed to a black and white view of "real queer people" (i.e. queer people who are not partnered to other-sex people) versus bi people, seen as people who automatically benefit from an uncomplicated straight privilege due to the assumption that they are or will end up in opposite-sex partnerships and have no other visible markers of queerness.
Part of the problem is that I think most of us, within queer and queer ally spaces, do buy into a particular stereotype of the "typical bisexual" - a cisgendered young white woman who is partnered to a man, and either had some sexual interactions with women when she was single, or occasionally has threesomes with her man and another woman. I admit, one of the reasons I am still wary of describing myself as bisexual despite knowing, intrinsically, that my sexual desires are very queer, is because I fit into that stereotype. I know I have experienced very little homophobia in my life (although it would be incorrect to say I haven't experienced any) and don't anticipate facing much in the future, so taking on an oppressed identity felt like appropriating. But how bizarre is it to define an orientation by the amount of oppression one faces as opposed to who you are? The underlying sentiment that I see behind the stereotype of the typical bi person and the reaction to Schickner's piece is that bi people are sexual tourists, privileged people who get to flirt with a queer identity in an appropriative fashion who always have the ability to retreat into straight privilege.
This way of viewing bi identity is typical of the main issue bi people face that is actually separate from homophobia: invisibility. Bi people who are non-gender conforming, who date primarily same-sex partners or are in a same-sex relationship often do not get read as bi at all. So their existence as bisexuals is invalidated and shoved into the tent of "real queerness" and we're left with the most privileged bi people as the unofficial representatives for everything bi.
I recognize the problems with drawing comparisons between different kinds of oppressions and I will attempt to resist doing that here. But "passing" is a word that is used in various communities to define how much a person is able, intentionally or unintentionally, to "hide" a socially undesirable identity from mainstream culture. In most discussions about "passing" (and I acknowledge the word is inherently problematic for multiple reasons) the idea is that any privilege one receives from passing is a double-edged sword. Someone can pass as something they are not and receive privileges for it, but that doesn't negate their core identity and forces them into a constant cycle of having to chose whether to continually out themselves or not. The very stress that has to go along with having to constantly make that choice, day in and day out, is largely ignored in the context of most discussions I see about bisexuality.
This factors in with the current accepted narrative that claims that homosexuality is inherently an inborn trait, as is straightness. What would follow from conclusion, which is simplistic but may be based in some degree of fact, is that bisexuality is similarly an inborn trait, but it isn't treated as such. It often seems to me that the notion behind a biological root of homosexuality is the idea that no one would choose gayness if they were able to. Bisexuals fuck up that narrative by having the ability to "choose" to live either a gay or straight lifestyle yet by the very act of acknowledging themselves as bisexual they refute and refuse the binary. This is obviously threatening, primarily to straight people who don't want to confront the issue of sexual behavior as a choice, but also to the modern mainstream gay rights movement which depends on the idea that gay people really just can't help it - they're born that way.
How does this relate to biphobia? One of the main reactions to someone coming out as bisexual is a "yawn" or "why does this matter?" Those reactions are telling. Because bis have the ability to choose, their queerness is invalided, both by straights, and yes, sometimes by gay people as well. It's a "yawn," as in, "Why would you tell me this? Your sexual behavior doesn't concern me. You're really straight and looking for attention." Or it's "Why does this matter? What you do with your sex life is of no concern to me." While gay people get these reactions as well, from what I've seen it's more pronounced with regards to bi folk, because their sexual orientation is conflated with their sex lives. There was a time when gayness was reduced to same-sex acts, but mainstream gay rights organizations have gone a very good job of presenting gay people as a"just like straights" - married, picked fences, and so on. And this works, because if we "heteroize" gay behavior to be "Just like straight people, - biological, inborn, but with the same sex instead of the opposite sex," then it's less threatening to straight people as they don't have to really question their own potential queerness. This has been defined as "homonormativity" by Lisa Duggan. From Wikipedia:
"According to Penny Griffin, Politics and International Relations lecturer at the University of New South Wales, homonormativity upholds neoliberalism rather than critiquing monogamy, procreation, and binary gender roles as heterosexist and racist.[30] Duggan asserts that homonormativity fragments LGBTQ communities into hierarchies of worthiness. LGBTQ people that come the closest to mimicking heteronormative standards of gender identity are deemed most worthy of receiving rights. LGBTQ individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy (transsexuals, transvestites, intersex, bisexuals, non-gender identified) are seen as an impediment to this elite class of homonormative individuals receiving their rights.[31] "
You'd think it would be a big "duh" to say that defining a queer person primarily through how they have sex is horrible, but this is the common way that bi people are spoken of on mainstream gay blogs and communities, even though this is exactly the same line of thinking that has dehumanized and sexualized gay people within straight society. Bisexual behavior is far to often treated as a kink, or a sideline sexual interest, as opposed to being part of someone's identity. Mainstream gay rights organizations may have been somewhat successful in desexualizing gays, but this has never happened for bis, and won't be able to happen until we move past the simplistic narrative of being "born gay" or "born straight." The inherent radicalness of bisexuality forces everyone to confront the full spectrum of human sexuality, and for that reason it's threatening. Bisexuality, as something that is not just a biological imperative but an active choice, resexualizes the narrative of queerness.
As I've said before, I am not anti-identity politics. It has been an incredibly valuable way to inspire individual and community pride, as well as an essential organizing tool for achieving tangible political gain. But when speaking in a holistic sense about "sexual orientation" or "sexual identity" identity politics does not provide the tools to speak about someone's full experience. A cisgendered bisexual person in a heterosexual relationship may often pass as straight, and in that sense they absolutely have privilege over many other queer people. Yet that passing is fraught. Bisexual people are constantly judged on the basis of their sexual and relational choices, not just by a homophobic straight society, but by the queer community that demands they prove their queerness as the price of admission. Bisexuals are the "other" in both worlds. Straights wonder why bisexual people would choose to be out as bisexual, when they could easily pass - as in, "Why are you wasting the straight privilege you could have?" It seems like no one cares how bis actually experience privilege. Tomorrowshorizion wrote about this experience on Feministing: "My experience is that being initially granted straight privilege often just makes the backlash more vehement than if we'd just be read as queer in the first place. We're not just seen as weirdos, but also as traitors once they figure it out."
Meanwhile, there is real emotional pain and frustration associated with the difficulty of not being accepted in the queer community while being rejected by the straight world that is ignored in the larger discussion about privilege and power.
I'm not saying we shouldn't call out bis in queer spaces when they engage in homophobia or act in privileged ways. Of course we should, and bis, particularly those of us who benefit from striaght privilege, have a responsibility to own that and know when our voices are oppressive to other queer people. That said, the way I see things framed in current discussions about privilege ignores the complexities of bi identity and lives. Identity politics have been very helpful, but what happens when it bumps up against individualism and shitty Internet behavior? We get a narcissistic version of the oppression olympics in which the less privilege you have, the more you "win" - win at what, I haven't quite figured out yet. It seems obvious that oppression isn't a zero sum game, but in many queer and feminist spaces online and in the real world, it's certainly treated as such. Thus someone is who is bi and out becomes a target, because being bisexual, they are admitting to having access to straight privilege, and thus their experience of queerness is made irrelevant. If that's not biphobia, what is?
There was a recent discussion in a friend's blog in which a lot of people understandably lambasted bisexual activist Kyle Schickner's "report" (I use this term loosely) about the lack of bi visibility at the 2010 GLAAAD awards in Los Angeles. The article, in addition to being poorly written, had some problems, notably his description of trans folk as having "leapfrogged from the bottom rung of the queer community past bisexuals by developing a community and iconic celebrities." The mainstream LGTBQ movement is at best dismissive of, and at worst, actively hostile and transphobic to trans people, and to set up this false dichotomy of trans versus bi (ignoring the many bi people who are trans). This can best be described as playing the "oppression olympics," and unfortunately colored what otherwise was a very fair point: that bi visibility has been significantly reduced since the 1990s, and that this is due to many factors, the most significant of which is a lack of a cohesive, political bisexual community within the LGTBQ movement.
But as the comments over Schickner's piece raged on, it became clear that many people who are queer or queer allies were incredibly dismissive over whether biphobia even exists, or whether bi activism is necessary or valid. The reasoning being that if one is visibly bisexual then the only oppression one experiences is homophobia And if one is not visibly bisexual (the assumption being that someone in a "heterosexual" pairing cannot be visibly bisexual, which is problematic in and of itself) then that person receives straight privilege, thus invalidating the concept of biphobia.
The argument goes that gay and lesbians, being part of an oppressed group, cannot have any institutional power over a privileged group - bisexuals being assumed to generally fall into the latter. And yet when you have examples like a self-described LGTBQ sports organization actively discriminating against bi people for "not being gay enough," it makes me wonder if the traditional model of privilege becomes too simplistic when talking about issues within queer communities. It seems that this is an area where a model based on intersectionality would be a more functional way of analyzing these issues as opposed to a black and white view of "real queer people" (i.e. queer people who are not partnered to other-sex people) versus bi people, seen as people who automatically benefit from an uncomplicated straight privilege due to the assumption that they are or will end up in opposite-sex partnerships and have no other visible markers of queerness.
Part of the problem is that I think most of us, within queer and queer ally spaces, do buy into a particular stereotype of the "typical bisexual" - a cisgendered young white woman who is partnered to a man, and either had some sexual interactions with women when she was single, or occasionally has threesomes with her man and another woman. I admit, one of the reasons I am still wary of describing myself as bisexual despite knowing, intrinsically, that my sexual desires are very queer, is because I fit into that stereotype. I know I have experienced very little homophobia in my life (although it would be incorrect to say I haven't experienced any) and don't anticipate facing much in the future, so taking on an oppressed identity felt like appropriating. But how bizarre is it to define an orientation by the amount of oppression one faces as opposed to who you are? The underlying sentiment that I see behind the stereotype of the typical bi person and the reaction to Schickner's piece is that bi people are sexual tourists, privileged people who get to flirt with a queer identity in an appropriative fashion who always have the ability to retreat into straight privilege.
This way of viewing bi identity is typical of the main issue bi people face that is actually separate from homophobia: invisibility. Bi people who are non-gender conforming, who date primarily same-sex partners or are in a same-sex relationship often do not get read as bi at all. So their existence as bisexuals is invalidated and shoved into the tent of "real queerness" and we're left with the most privileged bi people as the unofficial representatives for everything bi.
I recognize the problems with drawing comparisons between different kinds of oppressions and I will attempt to resist doing that here. But "passing" is a word that is used in various communities to define how much a person is able, intentionally or unintentionally, to "hide" a socially undesirable identity from mainstream culture. In most discussions about "passing" (and I acknowledge the word is inherently problematic for multiple reasons) the idea is that any privilege one receives from passing is a double-edged sword. Someone can pass as something they are not and receive privileges for it, but that doesn't negate their core identity and forces them into a constant cycle of having to chose whether to continually out themselves or not. The very stress that has to go along with having to constantly make that choice, day in and day out, is largely ignored in the context of most discussions I see about bisexuality.
This factors in with the current accepted narrative that claims that homosexuality is inherently an inborn trait, as is straightness. What would follow from conclusion, which is simplistic but may be based in some degree of fact, is that bisexuality is similarly an inborn trait, but it isn't treated as such. It often seems to me that the notion behind a biological root of homosexuality is the idea that no one would choose gayness if they were able to. Bisexuals fuck up that narrative by having the ability to "choose" to live either a gay or straight lifestyle yet by the very act of acknowledging themselves as bisexual they refute and refuse the binary. This is obviously threatening, primarily to straight people who don't want to confront the issue of sexual behavior as a choice, but also to the modern mainstream gay rights movement which depends on the idea that gay people really just can't help it - they're born that way.
How does this relate to biphobia? One of the main reactions to someone coming out as bisexual is a "yawn" or "why does this matter?" Those reactions are telling. Because bis have the ability to choose, their queerness is invalided, both by straights, and yes, sometimes by gay people as well. It's a "yawn," as in, "Why would you tell me this? Your sexual behavior doesn't concern me. You're really straight and looking for attention." Or it's "Why does this matter? What you do with your sex life is of no concern to me." While gay people get these reactions as well, from what I've seen it's more pronounced with regards to bi folk, because their sexual orientation is conflated with their sex lives. There was a time when gayness was reduced to same-sex acts, but mainstream gay rights organizations have gone a very good job of presenting gay people as a"just like straights" - married, picked fences, and so on. And this works, because if we "heteroize" gay behavior to be "Just like straight people, - biological, inborn, but with the same sex instead of the opposite sex," then it's less threatening to straight people as they don't have to really question their own potential queerness. This has been defined as "homonormativity" by Lisa Duggan. From Wikipedia:
"According to Penny Griffin, Politics and International Relations lecturer at the University of New South Wales, homonormativity upholds neoliberalism rather than critiquing monogamy, procreation, and binary gender roles as heterosexist and racist.[30] Duggan asserts that homonormativity fragments LGBTQ communities into hierarchies of worthiness. LGBTQ people that come the closest to mimicking heteronormative standards of gender identity are deemed most worthy of receiving rights. LGBTQ individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy (transsexuals, transvestites, intersex, bisexuals, non-gender identified) are seen as an impediment to this elite class of homonormative individuals receiving their rights.[31] "
You'd think it would be a big "duh" to say that defining a queer person primarily through how they have sex is horrible, but this is the common way that bi people are spoken of on mainstream gay blogs and communities, even though this is exactly the same line of thinking that has dehumanized and sexualized gay people within straight society. Bisexual behavior is far to often treated as a kink, or a sideline sexual interest, as opposed to being part of someone's identity. Mainstream gay rights organizations may have been somewhat successful in desexualizing gays, but this has never happened for bis, and won't be able to happen until we move past the simplistic narrative of being "born gay" or "born straight." The inherent radicalness of bisexuality forces everyone to confront the full spectrum of human sexuality, and for that reason it's threatening. Bisexuality, as something that is not just a biological imperative but an active choice, resexualizes the narrative of queerness.
As I've said before, I am not anti-identity politics. It has been an incredibly valuable way to inspire individual and community pride, as well as an essential organizing tool for achieving tangible political gain. But when speaking in a holistic sense about "sexual orientation" or "sexual identity" identity politics does not provide the tools to speak about someone's full experience. A cisgendered bisexual person in a heterosexual relationship may often pass as straight, and in that sense they absolutely have privilege over many other queer people. Yet that passing is fraught. Bisexual people are constantly judged on the basis of their sexual and relational choices, not just by a homophobic straight society, but by the queer community that demands they prove their queerness as the price of admission. Bisexuals are the "other" in both worlds. Straights wonder why bisexual people would choose to be out as bisexual, when they could easily pass - as in, "Why are you wasting the straight privilege you could have?" It seems like no one cares how bis actually experience privilege. Tomorrowshorizion wrote about this experience on Feministing: "My experience is that being initially granted straight privilege often just makes the backlash more vehement than if we'd just be read as queer in the first place. We're not just seen as weirdos, but also as traitors once they figure it out."
Meanwhile, there is real emotional pain and frustration associated with the difficulty of not being accepted in the queer community while being rejected by the straight world that is ignored in the larger discussion about privilege and power.
I'm not saying we shouldn't call out bis in queer spaces when they engage in homophobia or act in privileged ways. Of course we should, and bis, particularly those of us who benefit from striaght privilege, have a responsibility to own that and know when our voices are oppressive to other queer people. That said, the way I see things framed in current discussions about privilege ignores the complexities of bi identity and lives. Identity politics have been very helpful, but what happens when it bumps up against individualism and shitty Internet behavior? We get a narcissistic version of the oppression olympics in which the less privilege you have, the more you "win" - win at what, I haven't quite figured out yet. It seems obvious that oppression isn't a zero sum game, but in many queer and feminist spaces online and in the real world, it's certainly treated as such. Thus someone is who is bi and out becomes a target, because being bisexual, they are admitting to having access to straight privilege, and thus their experience of queerness is made irrelevant. If that's not biphobia, what is?
3/3/10
Identity: What Is It Good For? Something, Maybe?
I guess it's fitting that I start this blog off with a navel-gazing look at identity - both my own, and the concept. I'm not trying to write a thesis here (besides, others have done a far better job examining what, exactly, sexual orientation and gender identity entails than I ever could) but rather to provide a general introduction to who we are, why we decided to start this blog, and other useless nonsense.
In my previous life, when I played for the little leagues (i.e. LiveJournal, home primarily to angsty 17 year-olds and bored stay-at-home-moms taking a break from playing WoW) I frequently got into arguments about things that interested and mattered to me, regarding GLTBQ rights, feminism, polyamory, and identity. The problem was that while doing so I identified myself as being a straight, cisgendered woman in a monogamous relationship with a guy. What's the problem with that? In a LiveJournal identity politics debate, plenty, but the main problem for me was that it wasn't entirely true. But, lacking the vocabulary (or perhaps, the courage) to speak honestly about the very excruciatingly personal issues that lead me to self-identify as the tripple-whammy of straight, cisgendered, and monogamous in the rough-and-tumble world of a semi-notorious LiveJournal D-lister in which statements of sincerity are the fastest way to lose the game, that identity served its function for a time.
Let's break it down, then, with a serious commitment to honesty and pretending that anybody cares about my narcissism. Straight? In terms of who I've actually had sex with so far, absolutely. If we're going to define orientation based on behavior. Fact is, I used to identify as bisexual (and for a brief moment, pansexual, before I developed a distaste for the term) but gave it up, because I'd never gone past second base with a girl, and felt like I was one of the legion of young women appropriating a queer identity without ever having faced any sort of oppression as a result of my queerness. I felt like I was claiming a label without having "done the time" as it were. So despite my confused and complicated sexual yearnings, I made the decision about five years ago or so to just identify myself as straight. After all, I was in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship that I intended to be in for the rest of my life, so since I didn't see any future opportunities to prove my queerness to myself or anyone else, I decided to take the political high road: I'd identify myself as a breeder, and take one for the team. None of that trendy bisexuality stuff for me, thanks! I'd have to be satisfied with my attempts to be a queer uber-ally, because if I present as straight and normative, that's what I am, right?
What I didn't realize at the time was that I'd just basically put myself in some sort of weird, mixed-up identity-politics/radical theory closet out of guilt regarding my own privilege. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I suffered for my own mislabeling,far from it. But I wasn't being entirely honest with others and in the long run, with myself, either.
This would be the point at which it would be appropriate, perhaps, to have my co-author and fiancé weigh in with his own clumsy paragraph about his identity. Which he would, except he's out having what I can only imagine is incredibly amazing sex with some cute twink while I'm stuck at home with a terrible head cold, getting a nice buzz on from this mimosa. Hey, vitamin C is very necessary when overcoming illness! Anyway, I suspect that answers at least a couple basic questions regarding his identity and our current monogamous status.
Anyway, the point of this isn't to be all, "Blah blah I'm confused about what makes me hot despite being 30 and how pathetic is that, but validate me regardess," but just to give a context for how I personally relate to the identity issue, which overall I think is the most misunderstood and radically changing aspect of sexual politics today.
Outside of the magical Internet anti-kriyarchy blogowhatsnot most people automatically identify themselves as straight or heterosexual, when they bother to think of it, and the majority of everyone else identifies as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. What we fail to realize is that the very notion of an identity based on sexual orientation is entirely a modern one, and how we identify ourselves and others with regards to orientation and gender has been in a constant state of flux ever since. Pandora's box is wide open, as evidenced by a lot of the lesser-known orientations flying around as well: not just asexual, but say, panromantic asexual. Sapiosexual. (Look that one up. Please.) And so forth.
Fine, so there's a lot of wacky terms to describe something complex like orientational identity, no need to stop the presses, right? But the thing with identity is that once you start to think about it, you can't have a conversation about sexual politics without dozens of unsaid assumptions about what identity is and what it means coming into play.
In the conversation that lead to the start of this blog, my co-author and I were talking over tasty burgers and beer at Barney's on Piedmont. He was raging on about the relatively new concept gaining significant pop culture momentum of women having inherently fluid sexual orientation, with the mostly unspoken corollary that men have inherently static sexual orientation, as exemplified in Lisa M. Diamond's "Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Desires." In laymen's terms, women are inherently bisexual, and we shift throughout our lives through periods of being, whereas men are born straight, or gay, with little inbetween, save for those annoying bisexual men who persistently refuse to have their identity invalidated.
Of course, one can't even start to have a basic conversation about whether or not womens' sexual orientation is fluid and mens' static without engaging with the very concept of what identity is and how it is defined. Diamond seems to be, despite some claims to the contrary, an essentialist - a loaded term if there ever was one. Essentalism refers to different things in different contexts, but with regards to sexual orientation, it does refer to the belief in some sort of inborn, inherent preference with regards to sex partners. This is, essentially the mainstream view: people are "born" gay or straight. We like to pretend this view is rooted in science, but it's far more political, borne out of anti-gay movements that claimed that gay identity was a chosen behavior, and thus could be stopped, usually through a liberal dash of Jesus and prayer. The early LGTBQ (back then, just "gay") rights movement was based in a purely reactionary stance: if they say we can choose to be gay, we will say you can't! Sexual orientation is inherent. We're born this way, so you have to accept us. The problem is, in the real world, we all have anecdotal and perhaps even personal evidence that sexual identity, if not orientation, can be fluid. Hence Diamond and her thesis. Part of the problem, for Diamond, myself, and many people out there, I suspect, is conflating "orientation" with "identity" to begin with.
In his brilliant post "Respecting Sexual Identities" (linked twice now, it's that awesome), Pepomint writes:
"Identity functions as a kind of personal strategy. This is most obvious in the social arena, where a person considers their position and weighs how to describe themselves. Identities tend not to match perfectly, so expressing a sexual identity often is an exercise in compromises. For example, say a man only falls in love with men, but has good sex with women on occasion. Should he identify as gay, bisexual, or queer? If he identifies as queer, will everyone just assume he is gay? If he identifies as gay, will women assume he does not want to have sex with them? If he identifies as bisexual, will everyone assume that he is mostly straight but does men on the side occasionally?"
He goes on to talk about how identity is personal, political, and full of strategery. So is it really surprising that something this complex could be ever-shifting? At this point, I see identity politics primarily valuable as an organizational tool, and a way to frame a conversation. In terms of describing what burns in a person's hearts, or loins for that matter, it tends to be woefully insufficient, regardless of how many new terms we make up.
Between mouthfuls of sweet potato fries and gulps of Sierra Nevada Ale, I suggested that because we have frustratingly common conversations like this on a daily basis that we do what any good egotistic Americans should and commit said thoughts and discussions to the public realm vis-a-vis this much-touted blogosphere. Plus, I really just wanted to get away from LiveJournal. So here we are.
In my previous life, when I played for the little leagues (i.e. LiveJournal, home primarily to angsty 17 year-olds and bored stay-at-home-moms taking a break from playing WoW) I frequently got into arguments about things that interested and mattered to me, regarding GLTBQ rights, feminism, polyamory, and identity. The problem was that while doing so I identified myself as being a straight, cisgendered woman in a monogamous relationship with a guy. What's the problem with that? In a LiveJournal identity politics debate, plenty, but the main problem for me was that it wasn't entirely true. But, lacking the vocabulary (or perhaps, the courage) to speak honestly about the very excruciatingly personal issues that lead me to self-identify as the tripple-whammy of straight, cisgendered, and monogamous in the rough-and-tumble world of a semi-notorious LiveJournal D-lister in which statements of sincerity are the fastest way to lose the game, that identity served its function for a time.
Let's break it down, then, with a serious commitment to honesty and pretending that anybody cares about my narcissism. Straight? In terms of who I've actually had sex with so far, absolutely. If we're going to define orientation based on behavior. Fact is, I used to identify as bisexual (and for a brief moment, pansexual, before I developed a distaste for the term) but gave it up, because I'd never gone past second base with a girl, and felt like I was one of the legion of young women appropriating a queer identity without ever having faced any sort of oppression as a result of my queerness. I felt like I was claiming a label without having "done the time" as it were. So despite my confused and complicated sexual yearnings, I made the decision about five years ago or so to just identify myself as straight. After all, I was in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship that I intended to be in for the rest of my life, so since I didn't see any future opportunities to prove my queerness to myself or anyone else, I decided to take the political high road: I'd identify myself as a breeder, and take one for the team. None of that trendy bisexuality stuff for me, thanks! I'd have to be satisfied with my attempts to be a queer uber-ally, because if I present as straight and normative, that's what I am, right?
What I didn't realize at the time was that I'd just basically put myself in some sort of weird, mixed-up identity-politics/radical theory closet out of guilt regarding my own privilege. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I suffered for my own mislabeling,far from it. But I wasn't being entirely honest with others and in the long run, with myself, either.
This would be the point at which it would be appropriate, perhaps, to have my co-author and fiancé weigh in with his own clumsy paragraph about his identity. Which he would, except he's out having what I can only imagine is incredibly amazing sex with some cute twink while I'm stuck at home with a terrible head cold, getting a nice buzz on from this mimosa. Hey, vitamin C is very necessary when overcoming illness! Anyway, I suspect that answers at least a couple basic questions regarding his identity and our current monogamous status.
Anyway, the point of this isn't to be all, "Blah blah I'm confused about what makes me hot despite being 30 and how pathetic is that, but validate me regardess," but just to give a context for how I personally relate to the identity issue, which overall I think is the most misunderstood and radically changing aspect of sexual politics today.
Outside of the magical Internet anti-kriyarchy blogowhatsnot most people automatically identify themselves as straight or heterosexual, when they bother to think of it, and the majority of everyone else identifies as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. What we fail to realize is that the very notion of an identity based on sexual orientation is entirely a modern one, and how we identify ourselves and others with regards to orientation and gender has been in a constant state of flux ever since. Pandora's box is wide open, as evidenced by a lot of the lesser-known orientations flying around as well: not just asexual, but say, panromantic asexual. Sapiosexual. (Look that one up. Please.) And so forth.
Fine, so there's a lot of wacky terms to describe something complex like orientational identity, no need to stop the presses, right? But the thing with identity is that once you start to think about it, you can't have a conversation about sexual politics without dozens of unsaid assumptions about what identity is and what it means coming into play.
In the conversation that lead to the start of this blog, my co-author and I were talking over tasty burgers and beer at Barney's on Piedmont. He was raging on about the relatively new concept gaining significant pop culture momentum of women having inherently fluid sexual orientation, with the mostly unspoken corollary that men have inherently static sexual orientation, as exemplified in Lisa M. Diamond's "Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Desires." In laymen's terms, women are inherently bisexual, and we shift throughout our lives through periods of being, whereas men are born straight, or gay, with little inbetween, save for those annoying bisexual men who persistently refuse to have their identity invalidated.
Of course, one can't even start to have a basic conversation about whether or not womens' sexual orientation is fluid and mens' static without engaging with the very concept of what identity is and how it is defined. Diamond seems to be, despite some claims to the contrary, an essentialist - a loaded term if there ever was one. Essentalism refers to different things in different contexts, but with regards to sexual orientation, it does refer to the belief in some sort of inborn, inherent preference with regards to sex partners. This is, essentially the mainstream view: people are "born" gay or straight. We like to pretend this view is rooted in science, but it's far more political, borne out of anti-gay movements that claimed that gay identity was a chosen behavior, and thus could be stopped, usually through a liberal dash of Jesus and prayer. The early LGTBQ (back then, just "gay") rights movement was based in a purely reactionary stance: if they say we can choose to be gay, we will say you can't! Sexual orientation is inherent. We're born this way, so you have to accept us. The problem is, in the real world, we all have anecdotal and perhaps even personal evidence that sexual identity, if not orientation, can be fluid. Hence Diamond and her thesis. Part of the problem, for Diamond, myself, and many people out there, I suspect, is conflating "orientation" with "identity" to begin with.
In his brilliant post "Respecting Sexual Identities" (linked twice now, it's that awesome), Pepomint writes:
"Identity functions as a kind of personal strategy. This is most obvious in the social arena, where a person considers their position and weighs how to describe themselves. Identities tend not to match perfectly, so expressing a sexual identity often is an exercise in compromises. For example, say a man only falls in love with men, but has good sex with women on occasion. Should he identify as gay, bisexual, or queer? If he identifies as queer, will everyone just assume he is gay? If he identifies as gay, will women assume he does not want to have sex with them? If he identifies as bisexual, will everyone assume that he is mostly straight but does men on the side occasionally?"
He goes on to talk about how identity is personal, political, and full of strategery. So is it really surprising that something this complex could be ever-shifting? At this point, I see identity politics primarily valuable as an organizational tool, and a way to frame a conversation. In terms of describing what burns in a person's hearts, or loins for that matter, it tends to be woefully insufficient, regardless of how many new terms we make up.
Between mouthfuls of sweet potato fries and gulps of Sierra Nevada Ale, I suggested that because we have frustratingly common conversations like this on a daily basis that we do what any good egotistic Americans should and commit said thoughts and discussions to the public realm vis-a-vis this much-touted blogosphere. Plus, I really just wanted to get away from LiveJournal. So here we are.
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