Cheers to
for leaving this thoughtful comment on yesterday’s newsletter:
I’ve been thinking, lately, about how monosexism breaks people’s brains, how it creates this false binary that forces people to disavow decades of lived experiences, decades of identity, in order to make sense of their present situation.
I want to be clear about something before we go any further: there absolutely are people who stay in the closet for years or even decades, pursuing unfulfilling heterosexual relationships out of a sense of social obligation, before they finally come to the conclusion (or feel brave enough to publicly acknowledge) that nope, they’re gay. Those people exist, and while there are fewer of them now that the social stigma of queerness has decreased quite a people, there are plenty of folks who find that it still takes time to understand their actual desires, to understand that their relationships aren’t working out because they’re simply just not into that one particular gender.
However.
You know what’s weird? It’s weird that Miranda Hobbes, the Sex and the City/And Just Like That character with a long and well-documented history of attraction to men, is suddenly shunted into this “guess I’m a lesbian now!” category after a brief dalliance with a non-binary person. Certainly it’s possible that, having been exposed to queerness, Miranda now feels that she wants more of it, that she’s tired of and done with hetero sex and hetero men. Sure, that’s possible! It happens. But it is also very weird to just act like none of what she experienced prior matters, that she was just a secret little lesbian waiting to burst into bloom, that all those orgasms, all those dates with men, her entire marriage which she was very invested in for decades was just self delusion.
[In some ways this mirrors the public narrative around Cynthia Nixon (you know Cynthia Nixon is the actress who plays Miranda Hobbes, right?), a woman who was publicly branded (and even brief personally identify as) a lesbian because she fell in love with and married a woman after decades of exclusive attraction to men. Nixon eventually backtracked and now identifies as bi (a label she apparently initially rejected because, uh, “nobody likes the bisexuals), but it’s kinda wild to think that it felt totally plausible to people that a woman who’d never experienced attraction to women before meeting her wife was just brainwashed by comphet.]
What I run up against here, always, is… why are people so hesitant to call themselves bi? I mean, yes, of course, there’s all the stigma. But I think, too, that there’s this idea that to adopt the bi label is to necessarily say that you are open to, even actively seeking, relationships with more than one gender, like you’re “not allowed” to identify as bisexual but only feel interested in relationships with one particular gender.
And I have to admit there’s a part of me that gets that. Certainly, when I made the choice to start prioritizing pursuing women, to stop actively seeking relationships with men, there was a part of me that wondered if I should start calling myself a lesbian. “Bisexual” felt like I was leaving a back door open for male attention, like a “sure she says she’s sapphic but” wink and a nudge.
But I simply could not call myself a lesbian, friends. It felt like an ill fitting suit. It felt like a disavowal of the many positive romantic and sexual experiences I’ve had with men. It felt like I was setting myself up to fail a purity test I could not hope to pass — like if I did fall for a man in the future*, I’d be revealed as a traitor. For all its imperfections, “bisexual” simply allowed me the freedom to just be, you know?
And while it’s not quite the same phenomenon, I have to admit that I’m also thinking right now of this viral TikTok** in which a woman talks about how women are so much hotter than men, how she sees maybe 2 hot men a day but endless hot women. A lot of people saw that and were like, “Girl, you gay,” which seemed so so weird to me. She’s still attracted to like 2 men per day! There are lots of straight women who don’t find that many men attractive! She may be more attracted to women, certainly, but the idea that more attracted to women than men == lesbian and not “bisexual who is more attracted to women than men” just breaks my brain. Monosexism is a mental disorder, you know?
It’s fine to only be attracted to one gender. It’s valid! I support it! The issue I have is when we get all proscriptive about it, when we use our present moment to negate our past, when we assume there must be one “true” self we’ve been waiting for all along rather than a chaotic collection of selves who may emerge at different intervals over the years. You might be exclusively attracted to one gender at this given moment. That need not dictate your past or your present. People are complicated — and it’s the complications that make us beautiful.
* Which… kind of ended up happening? It’s complicated, dating sucks, at this point I just give energy to hot people who make me feel loved and supported, whatever their gender happens to be.
** I think it was a TikTok?
I was having a discussion recently about the “late-life lesbian turn.” My take on it was that hetero relationships are mostly shitty for women and require an enormous expenditure of hope and delusion to maintain. The longer you try and fail, the more bitter you get. Then, you cross the rubicon of your 45th birthday, when the straight male industrial complex has decided you are now a Gorgon they can’t look at without turning into stone and Morpheus is standing in front of you holding two pills that are “scrape the absolute bottom of the man barrel and be grateful for whatever you dredge up” and “die alone.” If a woman is equally terrified of both options, she can always scream “GAY NOW!” And run. Like, as a woman turning 50, I feel like men are just not an option. I hate them and they are repulsed by me (which is weird because, like, I look fine? I guess they can smell the menopause wafting off me like the stench of death?). I can see how, if I got into a relationship with a woman, I could just be like “it’s gonna be chicks from here on out!” Even if I still secretly crave dick. I totally get the impulse to throw one’s whole history with men in the trash because it probably belongs there. Also, I think a lot of heterosexual women don’t even crave dick that much, so having a relationship with a woman they’re not that into fucking is probably more emotionally fulfilling than a relationship with a man they’re not that into fucking…so…*shrug* gay? I dunno, I took the “die alone” pill.
So many instances of this! I have a friend who is married to a man who was a gay activist and part of a close knit gay community for most of his life. His first relationship was with a woman who he was very much hurt by and who he was in love with, he had sexual relationships with men for decades but not so much partnerships. Now he's married to my friend and they are very much in love in a sexual relationship. He still defines as gay - totally his to define. But as a bi person I note yet again that there is pressure to define ones identity as either/or. When I hear of someone years married to a man, now with a woman, I tend to quietly think of them as bi. Yet it isn't for me to say and so I don't say. Bring on the day, a day I have faith in, when this is no longer politicized. People are very threatened by "yes, and". This is also true for people who are multiethnic. People seem all too often empowered to define others.