I muse about words we use for sexuality for about 900 words and probably say something wrong. Here’s a fold so you can scroll past it easily.
Before you read this though, please remember that I am, broadly speaking, a grumpy, miserable person who muses about a lot of things in an ethereal way. I don’t live in San Fran or the Deep South, where a lot of these things are centred in my personal space. I’m not, as I’ve been told, particularly queer, or affected by -phobias. So what annoys me or seems weird to me?
Not necessarily interesting.
I muted ‘im gay’ in twitter a few weeks ago.
It’s a phrase I see a lot. If I knew regular expressions I suppose I’d mute ‘im so*o gay’ too. It’s not that I’m against my friends expressing the sentiment that they’re gay. I mean, I know, everyone knows, it’s really incredibly obvious if you interact with them for a few minutes at a time, even the ones who aren’t gay, but are bi or pan or something else, but they’re very gay even in their not-gayness. Gay is their brand, and I just naturally try to keep advertising out of my twitter feed, I suppose.
Still it does leave me to think about it a lot. And think about my own sexuality, my own status as the least of all queers, about how you can make the convincing argument that I’m not ‘bisexual’ as much as I am ‘heterosexual, drawn to femme presentation, and therefore, attracted to boys who pass a certain threshold of femme presentation,’ and then I think about how that’s an utter handful and then how bi implies two which implies binarism, which isn’t necessarily the case (because I do know that there are some nonbinary people I have found awfully cute), and so on and so on and I wind up down a rabbit hole that tends to just get brought up whenever I watch bi people waving around six characters that just say ‘im gay’ as if it’s a sentence worth sharing
again.
I think part of why this is on my mind is because, much like pronouns, sexualities are terms of utility, and the more I think about it, the more weird sexuality is to me, as a term we casually swap. Being able to say your sexuality is ‘I am sexually attracted to this grouping, or these groupings.’
That’s odd.
That’s odd because I have met people who are more about sexual attraction to a hair colour than they are about their attraction to a particular gender. I’ve met people for whom height is a bigger deal breaker than a person’s gender. I’ve met people who have a particular orientation but the actual people they’re attracted to is so small they could almost summarise themselves as ‘I’m these-six-people-sexual.’ And then, because sexual attraction is so important, because we have heteronormativity all over the shop, we then have words to indicate ‘not sexually attracted to anyone’ and then we have words to indicate ‘sexually attracted to things that don’t involve me,’ and ‘not sexually attracted, but sexually responsive, and therefore, can have sex with a sex-haver if they want and there’s some reason to and-‘
And all these words make me tired.
They make me tired, because really, they all flow from one really nasty word, and the big assumption at the core of it: Straight. I don’t have a problem with straightness. I mean, in some definitions, I am straight, I’m told, or at least, Not Bi. Straight folk are lovely folk. But their command of the language, and their operational factor around the language still sticks in my head as being really weird. Because we have straight, we needed, as a starter word, gay to indicate not-straight. And then splintering terms became more mainstream until we wind up where we are, where the common usage of sexualities as terms creates this bizarre experience where you’re expected to be able to answer, in one or two words, broadly speaking, what are you sexually attracted to?
And that’s weird.
Because we have these terms, in our language, that just assume, that just assert that not only can you tell people what you like, but you can tell them what you like in such a simple, refined way that we have a fairly tight vocabulary for it. That even though, of women, you may be attracted to about twenty or thirty of them based on their backgrounds, their personalities, their kinks, their physical appearances, their mannerisms and all that, if you’re a woman we’ll still have a special term for that.
One last thing about this that actually genuinely worries me rather than leaves me musing about the oddness of words, however, is how this affects asexual people. I know! I know I know I know, I brought them up as an example of a sexual label. But the thing is, when you make ‘I have sex with Xses’ and ‘I have sex with Ys’ into such a big part of the conversation, when you make it so that it’s just natural for everyone to be swapping information about who and what they bang, it feels like that’s going to create a naturally oppressive environment for people who don’t want to bang anyone. At all. Especially when flagrant displays of sexuality have become political tools in spaces, the held hand, the public kiss.
I’m not saying don’t do it, by the way, or that anyone who does it is doing anything bad. I’m saying that we don’t make tools for things we don’t need, and that we have these words, these tools for conveying broad swathes of wants and needs and demands and unconscious responses, because we need to convey to people, up front, in simplified words ‘here is a very, very limited idea of what I am attracted to, because you might need it for basic interaction.’
And that is a bit weird.