#like. more normal common things that lesbians DO experience. not unwanted attraction to men or the desire to be a lesbian.....

[mithliya]

the effect that the lesbian masterdoc had on the internet is so insane. i mean i know we all know that but i was on the uquiz website the other day and it had one on the recommended page that was about finding out if youre a "lesbian with comphet". i already had a bad feeling from that and did the quiz to see how it was. i answered honestly to see if it would armchair diagnose me since im a febfem with rare attraction to men and thats what some of those people would classify as comphet. fortunately it didnt and instead told me im bisexual and how thats completely okay (like um yeah?? lol. it gave a vibe of "dont be sad that youre not a lesbian") but the questions were obviously very heavily inspired by the lesbian masterdoc. like "are you only attracted to men who are unattainable?" like fictional characters or whatever. its now a common belief among chronically online girls that thats a sign of comphet like...yes im attracted to "unattainable" men too. which is a result of living as a woman in a patriarchy. fictional men cant hurt or disappoint or assault you. its literally so obvious why this is common among girls and yet they’d rather misinterpret it.

omfg this made me curious so i looked for a quiz like that on uquiz and. oh my god.

love how "little to no attraction to men" is an option on a quiz determining whether ur a lesbian.

women/non-binary ppl...

????????????? how is this supposed to help u figure out if ur a LESBIAN

i hate how this idea of compulsory heterosexuality is just ;.. bisexuality w a preference? and the funny thing:

the vast majority got comphet lesbian lmao. which is a given bc the quiz doesnt even differentiate between bisexuality and "comphet lesbianism"

anyways i wish ppl realised the comphet masterdoc was made by some girl who actually turned out to be bisexual and would stop using it as lesbian gospel. i once saw this 'lesbian' youtuber do a video on it and was like :0 omg i relate soooo much!! until a trans youtuber did a video critiquing it for being 'biphobic' (no word on how lesbophobic it is tho) and the 'lesbian' youtuber then did a whole switch and was like OMG SHES SOOOO RIGHT ITS SO TRANSPHOBIC TOO RIGHT?? or seeing kehlani say she realised shes a lesbian bc of the comphet masterdoc when she was in long-term relationships w men and was talking about how shes super into feminine and 'queer' men a few years prior...... idk its annoying as hell.

when i was in my teens, we didnt have this masterdoc and i remember lesbians already used the term comphet back then but it was way more normal instead of this 'if u have a crush on a guy but dont want to, its comphet <3' nonsense

[cowboyjen68]

hey jen! good lesbian morning! im sure you've answered this question tons before so sorry if its a repeat. ive been out as a lesbian for years and years, but i still experience guilt in my attraction to women. i feel predatory and like im doing something i shouldnt be. even though im not blatantly staring or anything, it feels like im being a bad feminist or something when im attracted to a woman ill see passing by. do you have any tips on moving past this hangup? i dont want to feel bad for something i know is beautiful

Happy Thanksgiving and lesbian good morning. I never get tired of repeating or reemphasizing the shared struggles lesbians have in this world.

Just the other day I was talking to a lesbian friend about how, in high school, we purposely kept ourselves as "small" as we could and kept our eyes down partially to not be noticed but also to not be "creepy". We held guilt for "objectifying" or finding a woman attractive. It felt like we were breeching her boundaries by thinking she was physically attractive without her permission.

This feeling did not go away when I came out or even as I gained more lesbian friends. I can't be sure where this all comes from but I can hazard a guess that is a cumulation of many things we are exposed to from a young age

In western culture, and probably many, young women are warned by our older women family and friends to beware of the strange man. That strange men can be dangerous. We see men in our lives praised for dirty jokes about women, boys are encouraged to "kiss and tell". Girls, then women, see all this.

Many of us know how it feels to get unwanted attention. Or at least have friends that have experienced this. Everything from cat calls to aggressive advances or harassment in places of work, public spaces and even in our homes.

We gain empathy through these shared experiences. Basically we know how gross it feels to get unwanted attention and we do not want to be the one to cause that feeling. We feel predatory EVEN when the woman has no idea. We take on guilt because we want women to feel safe, especially around us.

You are not alone and this is so common. My older lesbian friends taught me that natural attraction is not predatory. It is beautiful. Finding women attractive is beautiful (this actually goes for men or women), it is how we handle it that makes the difference.

Taking no for an answer with grace and brevity.

Complimenting women on things they can control, clothing, haircut, accessories, things they put effort into not on things they can’t help or change. 

Read the room. If she is giving hints she is not interested (backing away) trying to end a conversation etc) take a hint and err to the side of caution by excusing yourself from her space. 

As far as attraction without her permission:  Your natural attraction and sexual orientation is just that, natural and your orientation. It is normal and healthy for you to find other women sexually attractive.  Her being unaware is okay. We are human and fantasizing, dreaming, imagining and crushing about real people in our lives is just, well, human.  It only becomes predatory when we push the boundaries of another person and let it be known that we will not respect her wishes. 

We only are creepy when we are violating her privacy, Spying, consistently breaking social boundaries like asking inappropriate question of friends or even her. “Is your friend single?” is ok. “Is your friend a lesbian?” Also okay. “Is she into (something sexual)? is not okay. Creepy is literally the act of creeping on someone instead of just communicating interest. 

I hope this helps/

[yelloskello]

i fucking hate the stag/doe - butch/femme thing. I hate it. I hate that we are explicitly told that we’re not allowed to use these terms, and for what? I went a’googling to see what lesbians were actually saying in regards to why they’re lesbian-exclusive, read the arguments straight from the horse’s mouth, and it amounts to this:

TERFs (and no, I do not mean lesbians = terfs, I mean it is TERFS who came up with this) straight-up believe that bi women and trans women just weren’t there in our history. They say that butch and femme carry the weight of a painful history and fighting for our rights in the words, and that when anybody but lesbians use the terms, they’re putting it on like a fancy dress and calling it an aesthetic.

As if bi women and trans women just straight-up weren’t there for that history, too.

They argue that ‘nobody fights men to use phrases like bear/otter/twink!’ and quite frankly, i’m pretty fuckin’ sure bisexual men and/or trans men can happily use those terms, too, so shitty argument there pal. 

So they kick us out of a history that we were actively a part of, and younger lesbians who want to do the right thing but don’t know the history of this argument latch onto it, and bisexual people... Within the last year... Create the terms stag/doe, since it’s evidently morally wrong to use terms that are part of our own history, but since we can experience the same kind of dynamics in our relationships, we need SOMETHING to describe them. And what do people say?

‘wtf this is so dumb/fucked up, this is just watered/down butch and femme, they’re literally the same thing, why would you make up new words to mean the same thing?’

because we experience the same goddamn thing, just because we like multiple genders doesn’t mean we always hop on “opposite” genders, we can have relationships with similar-gendered/nonbinary people, even outside of a relationship we are still part of the community, we still experience Gay Attraction, and it can still be part of our identity because we’re still LGBT+, but we’re not allowed to use those terms! We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.

I hate the wave of separatism that we’ve gone through. I hate the idea that everything has to have shit exclusively for them, even if it has a history of being used by multiple sexualities. I hate that people think No Experiences Overlap Ever, when in truth, marginalized people (and I don’t mean just queer/LGBT+ people - I mean PoC, disabled folks, etc) have SO much more in common than anyone might ever think. Yes, some groups do have things that exclusively happen to them, as a white person i’m NEVER going to fully understand the struggle that brown and black people go through, there’s SO much i’m still ignorant to concerning that, i’ll never pretend all our experiences are exactly the same, but there are also at least some issues that I can strongly empathize with because I hear what they go through and can see similarities in the way i’m treated as an AFAB person or as a bi person or as a nonbinary person. A microaggression because you’re gay and a microaggression because you’re brown are both microaggressions, even if they’re presented in different ways, over different issues. Multiple groups are denied housing and jobs for their identities, even if it’s done quietly behind closed doors so the law doesn’t crack down on peoples’ bigotry. As a trans person I can feel the personal pain of my people being accosted in bathrooms by bigots, and I can look at how black people are assumed to be criminals by virtue of simply walking around in a store, and even though the issues are very different, I can see the similarities - we both are mistrusted by “””normal””” society based on hideous stereotypes - and I can feel for them, even if I don’t experience being assumed to be a criminal personally. I listen to them and I believe them not just because they’re fucking people who deserved to be listened to and believed, but because I have seen how general society treats people like me, so why should it be so hard to believe they could be treated like shit, too?

People think that our struggles are so fucking exclusive that they lose all empathy for other groups, thinking that the only people who have ever suffered are themselves. It’s always baffled me that LGBT+ people can be so fucking ignorant and racist and hateful when you think they’d be able to tap into their own hurt and understand that other people are being treated in similar ways because they’re ‘different’, too. But then again, LGBT+ people can barely understand how other subsets of LGBT+ people have struggled, so I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising. I think of how ace people can write a laundry list of things they personally experience, and other subsets will scoff and say ‘yeah as if we don’t go through that too’, completely fucking ignoring what that overlap means. Thinking that since they go through that, anybody else who reports that they might, too, are just Faking, or trying to steal the spotlight. How can people so completely lack empathy? Why are we not there for each other? Why do we not care about anybody else? Why can’t we recognize the same fucking pain we’re all going through, even if that same pain comes in different flavors, and try to be there for each other because nobody should have to go through what we’re going through?

Like, it’s a complicated issue. Like I said, yeah, groups do have stuff that effects them exclusively, and it can be frustrating to express unhappiness with something exclusive to your group and have people who clearly aren’t actually understanding what you’re going through say they can relate. But denying that there are any similarities at all just drives us farther apart when right now marginalized people desperately need the support of one-another. 

(I was gonna give bi people’s Double Discrimination as an example of that exclusivity, unwanted by communities on either side of the fence, since obviously lesbians and gays don’t experience that... But y’know who probably can empathize? Mixed race folks. Or folks with invisible disabilities. Or ANYONE who’s caught between both communities, not x enough for one and not y enough for the other.)

Speaking only of communities that I am personally in: in LGBT+ circles, separatism breaks up the subsets and causes infighting. In circles concerning disability and mental/physical illness, it isolates its members, denies them support, makes them feel like nobody truly understands, even people dealing with the exact same disability or illness, because symptoms can be so widespread and varied. Hell, even when dealing with our oppressors, separatism fails to actually try and change the views of the people oppressing us: i’d much rather have narratives where men are gentle, kind, feminine, loving, supporting, open to their emotions, and respectful permeating our culture, teaching young boys how to be as they grow, than narratives where men are just evil.

There’s a lot of gray area. There are people who have been so hurt by oppression that I do not blame them one bit for prescribing to a separatist narrative. But I mean in a general sense... I don’t want separatism to be pervasive. I don’t want it to be the mindset people automatically turn to regardless of what they’ve gone through. I want sympathy and support for the people who have been hurt, and I want the groups that have been doing the hurting to change. I want people to recognize the similarities between each other and be unafraid of empathizing and sharing.

The butch/femme and doe/stag thing is a result of separatism, and I can see where they get the idea for it - basically pulling the ideas of appropriation from communities of PoC telling white people not to appropriate their stuff - but they’re lashing out at the wrong people. When a white person appropriates locs, they’re seen by the public eye as being carefree, trendy, and cool, while black folks are still punished for wearing the same look that occurs naturally for them. When a white person puts on a war bonnet, they’re seen as being high-fashion and ‘exotic~~~’, while literally desecrating a sacred part of a culture they don’t belong to in any way, shape, or form. When a bi person calls themselves butch, they’re a part of the community that shares the exact same history, their histories are literally interwoven, and experiences extremely similar dynamics, at the very least, as lesbians. These are two very different things. Tell cis/straight people not to appropriate the terms, but remember, other LGBT+/queer people aren’t fucking cis/straight.

anyways this got way longer than I was expecting but shit, I got like 60 followers, who gives a damn what I say, right? peace.

[runesrule]

"Girls kick ass; says so on a t-shirt”: Feminism in James Cameron’s ‘Dark Angel’

Author’s note: goes without saying the following meta contains some spoilers, and language warning coz it’s me writing it. Now, read on. 

Recently, I have dived into a re-watch of James Cameron’s cyberpunk/biopunk scifi Dark Angel. The first time I watched Dark Angel was sometime around 2009-2010 mark, and a few things about it made a serious impact on my budding ideas of feminism. The series, which ran for two seasons from 2000-2002, is the story of Max, a genetically-engineered super-soldier (or ‘transgenic’) who escapes the top-secret government facility known as Manticore as a child. She, along with twelve of her ‘siblings’ split up in order to disappear into a ‘pseudo-post-apocalyptic police state’ AKA a United States of America where an Electromagnetic Pulse has wiped out most of the technology pre-2009. She eventually becomes entangled with Eyes Only, an idealistic hacker battling police corruption and the oppressive regime which controls Seattle, where most of the action in the series happens. Eyes Only AKA Logan Cale, is a cyberjournalist played by Michael Weatherby. 

James Cameron has said that Max is medium of bringing back the ‘tough, female warrior’ to our TV screens, and for most part, he succeeded. The character, played by Jessica Alba, poses an interesting question in regards to feminism. On one hand, Max AKA X5-452, is undoubtedly a warrior; a bad-ass, ass-kicker with a banging bod, who oozes female sexuality and doesn’t back down from a fight. However, it really isn’t Max’s downright lethal fighting skills, or her sharp, scalding wit that make her memorable to me. It’s her relationships throughout the series with other women that always attracted me to the series, and to the character herself. In the first season is Max’s roommate, the perky, blonde Kendra as well as the wonderful series regular, Original Cindy, a black, gay woman who is Max’s best friend, as well as Asha, the idealistic crusader against government corruption. Asha’s one of those characters who gets dismissed as the unwanted third point on the inevitable love triangle. She’s introduced as a further complication in Max and Logan’s heart-wrenching love story in the second season (Uh, geez, Cliffnotes version: Max gets injected with a virus that’s targeted directly for Logan’s DNA sequence, when Manticore discovers his secret identity as Eyes Only). The thing is, Asha is so much damn more than simply a love interest. She’s a fighter for the S1W, a group of activists working with Eyes Only to fight the good fight, a great friend to Logan, and a genuinely decent human being. Ultimately, despite her position as the ‘other woman’ in the narrative, she and Max not only find common ground, but on more than one occasion, the two of them actively display mutual respect for one another. As rare and uncommon as that is in the love triangle trope, it’s the fact that despite initial hostilities between them—to be fair, Max is basically hostile to everyone she doesn’t know and love—they manage to move beyond the romantic entanglements. It’s a refreshing example of women supporting women, despite the narrative having every opportunity to pit them against one another in a bikini-wearing, wet t-shirt catfight to the death. It might be my lifetime membership to the SHARON CARTER IS NOT HERE TO BE STEVE ROGERS’ GODDAMN LOVE INTEREST club, but I really, really adore Asha and Max’s relationship. Next up to the discussion booth is the one, the only, the incredible Cynthia McEachin AKA ‘Original Cindy’. Hit me up: how many black, gay women who wear their natural hair, are nurturing and kind as well as sassy and unafraid to throw a few punches are actually represented in today’s media? Right?? Anyway, Original Cindy is Max’s best friend. She’s sex-positive as hell and multi-faceted. She’s also a normal-sized human, which is a nice element to have when Jessica Alba is running around being lithe and tiny and fit as hell. I am one thousand percent here for more Original Cindy’s in popular culture. Firstly, she has an understandable what the actual fuck reaction to finding out that her best friend is a genetically engineered super-soldier on the run from shady Men In Black types who will kill and maim whoever they have to in order to get their hands on her. Then, when she’s processed, she stands by Max, unhesitatingly. At one point, she literally puts herself between Max and a sniper’s rifle while pretending to be Max’s hostage. (However, she’s also biphobic as hell, uses some fairly transphobic language at one point in Season One and the one time Cindy gets a grounded, well-rounded love interest, Diamond gets stuck in the ‘bury your gays’ plot. Horrifically.) Of course, no discussion of feminism is complete without addressing our transwomen. I guess the fact that there is actually something to discuss gives the show props? I’m cisgender, so I’m not qualified to write from any platform of authority. The facts are this: Louise is a transwoman (who, by the way, is played by a transwoman Jessica Crockett) and lesbian who dates our heroine’s hard-to-like boss Normal before realising she’s gay. I would love to hear from any transwomen who might have watched Dark Angel, and what they think of Louise. As I said, a lot of the language surrounding Louise’s split second feature in a S1 filler ep is problematic and dated. She’s kind of outed against her will when Original Cindy rifles through her purse in order to find out what kind of woman would go out with Normal at all. The thing that always stuck in my mind is that Normal doesn’t give a shit that she’s trans, and it’s only the fact that she likes women that stops him from pursuing her romantically. To continue on the ‘Your favs are problematic’ roll I’ve got going now, let’s talk about Annie. Annie is introduced in Season 2 as a love interest for Joshua, a Manticore experiment who has ‘dog in his cocktail’ resulting in some altered facial features and super senses, as well as truly abominable table manners. She’s a black, blind woman who receives a grand total of three episodes before being unceremoniously murdered by Season 2’s antagonist Ames White. Her death facilitates Joshua moving to Terminal City, where the grand finale of the series goes down. Phew, boy. It’s telling that I completely forgot about Annie’s existence until this recent re-watch. The thing that drives me completely mad is that narratively there were ways around this. Sure, there always is, but sometimes character deaths are the most straight-forward, least convulated way to move a plot forward. I’m a writer, I get that. Sometimes it sucks, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Annie’s death did not have to happen. Sure, her murder by White shocks the audience into realising that Ames is indeed a monster (There were some episodes preceeding this one where his attitude towards his Murder All The Non-Humans deal seems to be softening slightly), and forces Joshua to move to Terminal City, where they find the rest of the Manticore transgenics and stage a last stand. But… Annie’s murder takes place during a chase to find Joshua in the labryth-like setting of the sewers under the city. Another series regular, Max’s workmate and friend the dorky, lovable Sketchy, is also in the sewers, chasing the story for his beloved gossip rag. He emerges, unscathed from the battle, while Annie is left behind to die at Ames’ hands. Now, Sketchy has had a heap of close calls: he’s been kidnapped by the government goons chasing Max and released on the assumption that he’s a bumbling idiot (Spoiler alert: he’s actually not) He’s also been knocked out by Max on more than one occasion and nearly beaten to death by a bunch of ‘steel-heads’: cybernetically enhanced punks. Sketchy is comic relief. He’s the jester of the court; you want to wound our heroes and shock the audience? Take him out. This is a character we’ve been rolling our eyes and laughing at for two straight seasons, and he would have died before we saw his redemption from hating the transgenics to realising that he’s best friends with two of them in Alec and Max. How is that not just as tragic as Annie’s death? I suppose because Sketchy is a loud, skinny white boy not a gentle, helpless blind woman whom Joshua loves, because as always Man Pain™ must win out. (I mean no disrespect to Joshua; Joshua is a golden retriever human and must be protected at all costs) See, Sketchy dies in the sewers, our heroes are collectively enraged and heart-broken, and Joshua still moves to Terminal City because it could have been Annie who died, I must protect her, whine-whine, howl at the moon, love sucks. See? We get to keep Annie and her guide dog Billie alive, and the plot continues in the exact same way, Man Pain™ included. 

So I don’t mean to try and make out that ‘Dark Angel’ is a bad show. It may fall victim a little to the our strong female lead is strong because she can kill twenty grown men with her little finger while wearing booty shorts and a bikini top type of thinking, but it is genuinely a really cool, female-led scifi with a unique idea and really cool, edgy world-building. 

Max is one of those heroes that sticks around in your head, and despite the unsatisfactory finale, ‘Dark Angel’ is a show seriously worth the watch. 

[lunar-root]

“I don’t know how I expected a rape victim to act, but I didn’t expect her to be so funny. Or to be punk, in this kinda sexy bleached blonde but kind of too lazy to really care sort of way. Or to be so up front.

“I may be a lesbian because of what happened to me, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter at this point.”

I guess, maybe in some way, I didn’t expect her to be so over it. Part of me, unconsciously, believed people who had been raped were irrecoverably broken, and she wasn’t. I had an ex boyfriend who said he thought rapists should be subjected to capital punishment, which I suppose is a more extreme articulation of that unconscious belief. Once a woman has been raped, she has been destroyed.

People aren’t destroyed through being raped though. They suffer immensely, but they are just as much themselves after the rape as before.

Another rape victim I dated was a butch woman who had just adopted a kitten that completely befuddled her. When I went back to her apartment, the kitten was everywhere attacking everything.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ve historically been more of a dog person.”

She was pretty open about her anger towards men, and her sexual orientation was difficult to quantify because her attractions included “any gender that’s not cis male.” Can’t say I blamed her. But, despite her anger, she was completely and fully her. Even if she drank too much, and even if she hated men, her fundamental essence was untouched.

How I think of women who have been raped contrasts greatly with how I think of men who have experienced non sexual violence. One of my male friends was standing outside a club when he was hit from behind. He fell down, and two guys came up and kicked the shit out of him before running away.

I think that event changed him in some ways. We used to do jiu jitsu together, but he had a particular drive that I think was borne of that experience. He’s very good, I think he teaches it now. Yet, when men get beat up, I don’t ever entertain the impression that some part of them may have been destroyed. (I actually think there may be an opposite problem, namely men not getting emotional support because we don’t take their trauma seriously. I’ll have to write about that later.) If a man’s behavior changes after an attack, we don’t use this as evidence to support an unconscious belief that he is broken. If you told someone that a man had learned jiu jitsu after being attacked, I think the vibe would be “well, that’s pretty reasonable.” If a bisexual woman decided to date only women after being raped, the vibe would be “oh, she’s broken.”

This belief in the “brokenness” of those have experienced sexual trauma is highly damaging. None of us want to be broken. I don’t want to be broken. And, at least for me personally, this belief in the uniquely destructive power of sexual trauma prevented me from honestly confronting some of my more difficult sexual experiences.

A few years ago, I was out getting drunk with a bunch of male friends, and one of them offered to let me crash at his place. He was someone I trusted, someone I’d been friends with for years. When we got back to his place, suddenly he was all over me, and he’d managed to get his fingers into my vagina before I was able to physically restrain him. I remember confusion, and then shock at realizing his fingers were inside of me. And, I remember how he wilted when I stopped him. He shrank with shame, and I felt so guilty. I spent the night, but I couldn’t sleep, and slipped out at 6am after giving him a kiss on the head.

Then, I brushed it off. I had years of therapy after that, and never brought it up because I didn’t think it was significant. Yet, there were a few differences. I didn’t like being touched anymore. I stopped dating men, and then stopped dating anyone. I lost all sexual desire, and have been single now for about a year and a half.

I also started meditating. “Crying” has been a big part of my meditation practice. Just, nameless, faceless crying with no discernible reason. I sat a meditation retreat for 7 days, and the first 5 days were spent crying. I was completely exhausted, and in discussions with my teacher I basically said “I can’t keep doing this” and she basically said “keep trying.” Then, sometime around the fifth day, I stopped crying. I had expected some sort of catharsis, or release, or knowledge or something, but it wasn’t like that. I just stopped. And, after that I felt better. Not totally better, not like, I don’t still cry sometimes. It was just like — this nameless sadness that seemed to have no bottom ran out, and where it had been there was nothing.

Shortly after my retreat, I was reading a Savage Love where a woman talked about a male friend of hers trying to finger her when he was drunk. Dan Savage told her she’d been the victim of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault. And, when I read that, I was like ��how can she have been sexually assaulted? That’s exactly like what happened to me, but I wasn’t…” So, I looked up sexual assault. Apparently if someone touches your vagina against your will, that’s sexual assault.

I pondered over that. I read about what happened emotionally to people who had been sexually assaulted, and a lot of it fit with my experience. The blocking it out. The justifying. The guilt, the aversion to touch, and hyposexual desire. They were all common responses from people who had been sexually assaulted. And, when I read about that, I felt relief. These mysterious things that I had been feeling had a source. I also think that I was so lucky to have gone on those dates with those women, because I already had a deep understanding that people who have experienced sexual violence aren’t any less awesome or less complete than those who haven’t experienced it. Without that understanding, I think admitting to yourself that you have experienced sexual violence is harder, because you also have to think of yourself as “broken.”

I continued to wonder about why I had been so dismissive about how painful I found that experience, and at the heart of it was “it was just a more extreme version of how I always feel with men.” I came out as bisexual when I was around 12 years old (or “was outed” I should say) and ever since then, I have faced a lot of unwanted sexual attention. People accused me of just being bisexual “for attention” despite my own lack of agency around coming out, and despite the fact that they were the ones giving me all the attention. Boys asked me to kiss other girls, and initially I complied. I was 12. I didn’t know better. When I got to high school, I was regularly asked for threesomes before ever losing my virginity. Boys would sometimes grope my breasts, or put their hands up my skirt, or make loud public comments about my body.

Eventually, I learned to fight back. I remember one time, after being called flat chested, shouting back at the guy “we can’t all have tits as big as yours!” and watching him flush deeply. Additionally, I was on the wrestling team with a bunch of guys who respected me for my wholehearted commitment to the sport, and I think that helped. Having a bunch of big, jock friends made people less inclined to fuck with me. Still, between the ages of about 12–14, I had been bombarded with so much sexual harassment that I had normalized the feeling of it. I knew I didn’t like it, but it didn’t feel strange. It felt familiar.

In retrospect, I think I may have had an especially bad run because I am a bisexual woman. Bisexual women experience a disproportionately high amount of sexual violence compared to straight and lesbian women, and that innately makes sense to me. I was repeatedly singled out for sexual attention because I was bisexual and, as the only out bisexual woman in the grade, I was a single target for the many boys who were fascinated by female bisexuality.

Anyway, I had already normalized the sensation of sexually directed harassment before I was even a teenager. It’s very particular sensation, but hard to describe —for me, it’s almost like nausea mixed with sadness and shock. I cried the first few times I felt it, but it soon became so common that I started numbing myself to it. By the time I was in high school, I was already fairly numb.

So, when I started dating men for real, I was already primed to not complain when I felt this feeling. Sometimes, however, it was so bad it broke through my numbness. When I young, one of my early boyfriends pressured me for sex. We were lying in bed, and he kept asking over and over again. I can’t remember if I explicitly said yes, or if at some point I just stopped saying no, but he ended up mounting my un-responsive corpse and pounding me until he came.

“How was it?” he asked me.

“It hurt,” I said. Then, he became really sad.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he kept saying over and over. I said nothing, and just lay there, but resolved never to say yes when I didn’t want sex again. It was a horrible feeling, probably one of the most horrible things I’d ever felt at the time. I think something in me closed that day, and I could never be really open with him again.

The thing was, despite whatever lie he told me or told himself, he knew I didn’t want to have sex with him. He knew I didn’t usually lie there like a dead fish. He could tell when I was wincing in pain. When I told him I had been in pain afterwards, he showed no surprise. I had only articulated what he already knew but was pretending he didn’t. Yet, for a man to seek his own sexual gratification from my body while knowing, but not caring, that it was causing me pain seemed so normal by that point that it didn’t seem like a big deal. There’s a word for what happened to me that day (sexual coercion) which was useful for me to discover.

But, what was more useful was actually another Dan Savage letter (I totally ❤ you, Dan!) It was a letter from a guy blaming his girlfriend from backing out of an orgy after she had said she was ok, but was giving clear signs that she wasn’t.

Your girlfriend wasn’t okay that night, CIC, and you knew it. She was telling you what you wanted to hear, CIC, and you knew it. You should’ve called the whole thing off, CIC, and you know it.

The idea that, if someone knew I didn’t want to do something sexual that they shouldn’t do it, was completely alien to me, and yet made total sense. Would I continue with an activity if my partner clearly didn’t want me to?…”