writerlylesbian

I do actually have some thoughts on this, though when I say 'thoughts', I probably mean 'essay'. And I actually think that we are currently in a better position to manage this challenge than previous generations of women. Right. So, essay incoming. One thing I notice when reading a lot of the feminist sci fi that was written during the second wave, is that a lot of those novels made the assumption that all humans were innately bisexual. From that, I kind of extrapolate that this was an idea that was generally circulating in a lot of feminist spaces at the time. And it does make a certain amount of sense that women of the time were wondering about how much sexuality was a construct and how much of it was innate. That was an era when heterosexuality was very much enforced as the norm, and there weren't any alternatives.

But, we've now had a good 20+ or 30+ years in a handful of countries where it has been (sort-of mostly) okay to be gay, so if human sexuality really were that fluid, we would expect that we would have a sexual landscape that would have shifted very dramatically. That hasn't happened. Most people are still straight, while a minority are LGB. LGB just stopped being persecuted so much, which was obviously a good thing.

I can imagine that the idea, or perhaps the hope, that women could just train themselves out of attraction to men would have seemed like the perfect feminist solution to many problems the feminist movement was dealing with. But it hasn't panned out that way.

Related to this, it is only very recently that women have actually been able to have enough sexual autonomy to be able to be able to articulate and pursue their own desires, which I think is has helped us to be able to find where those boundaries are between lesbian desire, bisexual desire, and heterosexual desire, and to recognise that they are indeed different and distinct sexualities. The fact that we have been able to do this is hugely significant. Because it means we don't all have to smoosh together under a big umbrella like 'political lesbianism' - we can recognise areas of overlaps, as well as areas of difference, in terms of how we're treated in society as women, how we experience our sexuality, and what consequences that sexuality might have for us.

I think it's also helpful to think about how 'lesbianism' itself came to be viewed as a problem, and why. The concept of romantic friendship between women was hugely popular throughout much of the 18th and 19th century, and I have no doubt that there were lesbians who used the cover of romantic friendship to conduct their relationships. But society on the whole didn't care, at least nowhere near as much as it cared about policing gay men. I would argue that was because women largely could not opt out of marriage anyway, so dudes never felt like their control of women was threatened. But then came the first wave of feminism. Women were getting educated, getting jobs, earning their own money, getting into Boston Marriages so they could keep their independence. And again, not all of those women were lesbians, but I sure bet there were lesbians who embraced the Boston Marriage with huge amounts of enthusiasm, lol.

Concurrently, lesbianism (i.e. same sex desire between women) began to be discussed in the sexology literature of the time as a 'disorder' that needed to be treated. What a coincidence. So the recognition of lesbian desire as a distinct concept (seen as problematic by those dudes) paralleled the rise of women's rights. But I don't think that was just about starting to police lesbians, who were seen as a threat once they could have their sexual independence, though that absolutely was part of it. I think the larger project was to popularise the idea that any close relationship between women was suspect and unnatural, and I feel like even today we're still living with the legacy of that somewhat. And that feeds into all these strange ideas about how this or that women who even mildly bucks a completely standard life trajectory must be a lesbian. Which is of no help to lesbians, and no help to het or bi women either, quite frankly.

Anyway, where I'm going with this, is that lesbians are in a good position to articulate what we are, and how and why we're different from bisexual and heterosexual women. It's then up to bisexual and het women to own their own shit and figure themselves out too. They can't keep hiding behind lesbianism as a way to not deal with the problem of their relationships with men. They need to figure that out. We can't do it for them, and we need to have lesbianism as same-sex attracted homosexual woman because we need the space to talk about the negatives as well as the positives of lesbianism (like e.g. domestic violence in lesbian relationships), which we cannot do when we're held up as some great feminist ideal all other lesser women should aspire to.

But I also think that a lot of bisexual and heterosexual women recognise this too. And on bisexual women specifically, I find that the ones who have spent a lot of time in lesbian spaces generally integrate and don't cause a lot of issues. They can often actually better recognise what the differences are between themselves and lesbians, because they've spent a lot of time with lesbians. The ones who cause the problems are usually the 'tourists' coming from het land. They don't know or understand lesbian culture, come in crashing around like a bull in a china shop, bring a whole lot of heterosexual assumptions and attitudes along with them, start demanding sex and attention - and then get pissed off when lesbians don't react well, lol.