The best tool to understand the seamless coexistence of:
Lesbians being shamed and punished for not liking men.
Bi women being shamed and punished for liking men.
Straight women being shamed and punished for being “incorrectly” heterosexual (being trans, being sex workers, being promiscuous, being polyam, etc)…
Is understanding that under patriarchal order, women aren’t really expected to desire men. We’re expected to desire to be desired by men.
When a woman is a lesbian, she is punished for her categorical, inherent refusal to men. This should be obvious. We’re seen as denying men a fundamental “right” they should be granted, which is why we’re often seen as cruel, hateful or mean by the mere crime of existing as lesbians. This is why it is insisted that we give men “a chance” on a level that is not asked of gay men to give women “a chance”. Women have no right to men, men have a right (and exclusive obligation to subjugate through romance and sex) to women, so while gay men are of course expected to desire women and punished for not desiring women, they aren’t seen as owing women anything the way lesbians are absolutely seen as owing ourselves to men.
Seeing women as naturally, inevitably attracted to men is why too we can inform someone that we’re lesbians and receive the ridiculous answer of “if you keep saying you’re a lesbian men won’t date you”/“men don’t find it attractive when women say they’re lesbians”.
This is also why on average it’s so hard for lesbians to detect that we don’t like men in comparison to gay men detecting that they don’t like women. Men are taught to process their sexualities on the function of what and who THEY actively desire. Women are taught to process our sexualities on the function of who desires us and how we comply or not. Lesbians in denial end up thinking of whether they do or don’t like men in terms of what level of intimacy or servitude they could tolerate granting a man without wanting to jump off a cliff every second of it, rather than thinking of whether they WANT to be with a man or not. Attraction isn’t about tolerating or putting up, it’s about desires and wants, but for women it’s so hard to truly internalize that fact, more so when we’re not straight.
Aside from this, being desired on itself can be nice even when it doesn’t come from someone we want, especially if we’re told all our worth derives from being desired by men. It’s very hard for many lesbians to detect our unattraction to men because many of us do want to be desired by men not due to us desiring them, but due to wanting that validation of our worth as women. This is often goes exacerbated for trans lesbians, who for obvious reasons can feel much more of a need to validate their worth as women by having men’s attraction to them deem them as women enough. Lesbians who deviate in any other way from normative womanhood besides our lesbianism itself (lesbians of color, gnc lesbians, disabled lesbians, intersex lesbians, fat lesbians, the already mentioned trans lesbians, etc) have an even bigger problem with seeking validation from men being attracted to us than cis, thin, non-intersex, white, abled lesbians do in general, which is saying a lot.
When women are never taught to even consider active wants and are instead taught to focus on passive reception of men’s wants, just wondering if we like men or not is not on the table for us. It doesn’t so much as occur to most of us to practice asking ourselves that. When already realized lesbians dare to invite other women to practice a healthy exercise of questioning their assumed attraction to men (as opposed to scrutinizing and policing bi and trans women’s attraction to men, which is a different story), no matter how polite we are about it or how much we highlight that if they end up coming to the conclusion that they do like men that’s okay, it’s seen as a predatory violent plot intended to force other women to become lesbians so we can steal them away from men for ourselves, as if we were symbolically raping them, instead of it being seen as an act of reclamation of the sexualities of ALL women (not just lesbians) and healthy introspection.
In addition to that, lesbians, who’re “inferior” to men under the order of the patriarchy by virtue of being women/non-men, have the audacity not to just refuse men as I mentioned earlier, but to also exclusively desire women, which is a role that men, our “superiors”, are entitled to, not us. Who do we think we are? Do we think we’re equal to, let alone better than men? No wonder even other LGBT people see us as arrogant and delusional.
On the other hand, bi women disrupt the conception of women as only passive receptacles of men’s desire, despite them liking men. When they love women and men simultaneously, their attraction to men goes from being seen as an inevitable natural circumstance of their womanhood in which they obediently or resignedly allow themselves to be had by men because there’s “no other option”, to being seen as actively desiring men for themselves to use for their own romantic and sexual female satisfaction, which is the reverse of how it should be. In the eyes of the patriarchy, this makes them greedy, filthy sluts.
Men, under patriarchy, are not meant to be objects of desire for anyone, they’re meant to be the ONLY desirers (of women exclusively, as to not turn other men into objects of desire). That’s why a bi woman’s attraction to men is seen as perverse no matter how normative of a woman she is outside of her bisexuality. Bi women’s attraction to men is seen as deliberate in contrast to cis straight women’s supposedly passive, receptive, inevitable attraction to men, and that cannot be in the eyes of the patriarchy. Their mere existence (as well as lesbian existence) exposes that heterosexuality isn’t the natural condition of womanhood, that women do have desires of their own that may or may not include men, and when they do include men, they’re seen as having the gall to “reduce” men to objects of desire for their own gratification.
What’s more, not only do bi women have the audacity of making men objects of their “inferior” female desire, but they put them on equal footing to women as objects of their desire, which is worthy of patriarchal outrage. Women are supposed to be inferior to men. How dare they put that into question by desiring both? How dare they still recognize and claim their love for women when they love men too? Especially those who are monogamously with a man, when a man should be beyond “enough” as they’re always the “superior” choice? How dare they affirm their bisexuality regardless of who they’re with?
Like lesbians are a threat to the expected impossibility of women to escape men, bi women are the looming terror that even if a woman is with a man, it’s still not guaranteed that she’s straight.
When it comes to straight women it should be even easier to spot that the patriarchal obligation of women isn’t for us to desire men, but to be desired by them and having no desires of our own, because straight women, even the most normative ones, are heavily policed in how they practice their heterosexuality.
A straight woman is promiscuous? Much like bi women (regardless of each bi woman’s actual sexual behavior), her attraction to men is now seen as deliberate and active too, instead of as passive complying reception of men’s desires. She is a slut.
She’s polyam? She’s a GIANT slut whose desire for men is so degenerate, active and deliberate, that she can’t be content with just one. She’s no longer in competition against other women for men’s attention, men are in competition for hers and they can be “replaced” much more easily if she’s not satisfied with them, which isn’t women’s place within the patriarchy.
She’s a sex worker? Not only is she a slut, she has the double audacity of materially exploiting men’s desire for her (triple the outrage for lesbian, bi women and trans women sex workers), when love and sex between men and women is supposed to be an act of submission to men that should only materially benefit men. Sex workers DARE to have their sexual labor compensated, monetarily no less, when all of women’s labor to men is supposed to be an unpaid granted; from domestic labor, to sexual and romantic labor.
She’s trans? Besides betraying the manhood she was assigned, being living proof that traditional gender can be challenged, turning someone who “should” be a man (herself) into an object of desire, she is also turning men into objects of her desire as deliberately as bi women do – desire from the “wrongest” type of woman at that – and luring men who would otherwise be perfectly straight out of “proper” heterosexuality. Similar indignations of blurring the lines of “proper” heterosexuality are evoked when it comes to cis women who happen to be intersex. It gets more complicated for trans women who’re intersex too.
This is all without analyzing how these things intersect with race, with an emphasis on antiblackness/misogynoir, colonialism/the exploitation of Indigenous women, the simultaneous hypersexualization and desexualization of all woc, and so, so much more. Then there’s (dis)ability, whether we’re psychiatrized or not, class, etc.
This is why it can be perfectly true and coherent within a singular gendered system to shame and brutalize women for not liking men and for liking men, if liking men isn’t done in the very narrow particular way women are expected to do so; by being cisgender, exclusively devoted to men, prioritizing men’s desires over our own (which shouldn’t exist to begin with) with no compensation, etc.
This is why although all women are allowed to prioritize our particular experiences (as lesbians, as trans, as bi, as disabled, as woc, and so on), we cannot disregard the experiences of women different from us, including when we’re more marginalized than them, but much more so when they’re marginalized in ways we’re not (be us being privileged over them, or just equally disadvantaged in intensity but in different ways, such as it happens between lesbians and bi women).
Our understanding of our own oppression will always be incomplete if we don’t pay attention to other women’s oppression, and that way, we end up perpetuating theirs, then our own by extension. It’s lazy self-sabotaging, on top of being cruel.
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