LesbianLesbians Aren’t Attracted to a Female ‘Gender Identity.’ We’re Attracted to Women - Quillette article by Kathleen Stock

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[–]reluctant_commenter[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, I appreciate it. All good points. I was hesitant to post this article originally because it struck me as odd that her definition seemed so relatively loose. This is a good reminder for me to finish reading articles before deciding to post them, lol, rather than posting them halfway through reading.

Stock writes: "It’s fairly typical for young people to take a while to figure out what their orientation is, and sometimes it takes older people a while, too." It's just like with some trans, where a person "discovers" that they're trans. There's some sort of big reveal...

I think she's trying to cover all her bases with this statement without getting into the nuance. Like yes, there are examples of older adults coming out later in life, but I think usually there are some type of extenuating circumstances going on; for example, extracting onesself from a toxic religion.

Onto her alternate definition: "Strictly speaking, a sexual orientation should be understood in terms of the sex(es) you would be sexually attracted to under relatively self-aware, uncoerced, uninhibited circumstances, and not necessarily who you actually are attracted to right now."

Eeeek. Again, it makes me think that it's an apology for maybe a little bit of "bad lust" on behalf of the author. Concrete attraction in this very minute is empirical evidence.

Yeah, that really surprised me, too. Attraction is attraction. And if you are sometimes attracted to both sexes, well, that's not monosexual.

[–][deleted] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I read that article several days prior to you posting it and I just rolled my eyes... been fuming about it ever since, frankly.

There is a corpus of sex research where especially minority sexual identity folks have an identity that just does not match reality. shrug. Maybe another reason why people dislike bisexuality. But, ya know, there's like bisexuality and then there's biiiiisexuality.

"[W]hen I am attracted to men, I would not consider those feelings ‘hetero-sexual.’ I feel very lesbian about my feelings towards men. For example, even when I find men attractive, I’m still not into their genitalia and if I have sex with men I usually have lesbian-style sex with them. I keep my identity as lesbian consistent even when I am into men. (lesbian, woman -cisgender)"

Not even the most egregious example.

"At the outset many of our participants articulated a conceptual disconnect between their sexual orientation and sexual orientation identity. This was similarly expressed regardless of participants’ sexual and gender identity and is consistent with current sexuality research"

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15299716.2014.933466

Queer Theorists love this disconcordant stuff though. It's like moths to a flame.

...

Also a good read:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00918369.2013.760324

[–]reluctant_commenter[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Hmm. I'm debating deleting this post, honestly. I kind of wonder whether a lot of people might've upvoted just because of the article's title, which sends a positive message, but didn't notice some of the harmful content.

Related:

  • Kathleen Stock just got added as a trustee to LGB Alliance, so her influence will extend beyond just this article.

  • LGB Alliance also platforms Sheila Jeffreys, a founder of the feminist group that first promoted "political lesbianism," the idea that women can decide to be lesbians:

Not Jeffreys. She became a lesbian in 1973 because she felt it contradictory to give "her most precious energies to a man" when she was thoroughly committed to a women's revolution. Six years later, she went further and wrote, with others, a pamphlet entitled Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism And Political Lesbianism. In it, feminists who sleep with men are described as collaborating with the enemy. It caused a huge ruction in the women's movement, and is still cited as an example of early separatists "going way too far".

"We do think," it said, "that all feminists can and should be lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women." Although many of the more radical feminists agreed, most went wild at being told they were "counter-revolutionary".

source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jul/02/gender.politicsphilosophyandsociety

I'm not trying to be an alarmist here, but I'm concerned about the possibility that in trying to challenge the way that transgender people are stifling our voices, we may run the risk of having radical feminists stifle our voices. The more I read, the more it seems to me that there is a strong undercurrent of bigoted, or at least, downright misleading, beliefs about same-sex attraction in radical feminism.

[–]yousaythosethingsFind and Replace "gatekeeping" with "having boundaries" 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Keep up the post and the comments. There is value in the breakdown of this article in these comments. There is both good and bad in there. I do have the same concern about radicals feminism. In general, lesbians are almost never represented by actual lesbians.

But potentially giving Stock the benefit of the doubt where she says that it’s not about who you are attracted to right now, which in general I disagree with, it’s depending on what she is calling “attraction” and to what that person is “attracted” to.

[–]reluctant_commenter[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks for the suggestion. That's true, deleting it would hide all these thoughtful comments!

But potentially giving Stock the benefit of the doubt where she says that it’s not about who you are attracted to right now, which in general I disagree with, it’s depending on what she is calling “attraction” and to what that person is “attracted” to.

That's true, I was hopeful that there might have been some ambiguity there because she is allowing for cases where, say, someone might be persuaded to have sex with someone while drunk and become sexually aroused just because of physical manipulation-- I suppose you could call that "attraction" too. Guess we'll see in the long run!