I think straight men generally donât view women as autonomous, especially with regards to our attraction and sexuality. We divide ourselves by identity and experience, but they donât clearly differentiate between women who arenât currently expressing a willingness to be pursued by men.Â
The individual identities of lesbians and bi women blur for them, and they only really distinguish between them so far as it relates to themselves. Iâve read that even straight women are frequently accused of being lesbians by male abusers, and of course weâve all seen or heard of men accusing any woman who turns him down of being a lesbian. It seems to me that straight male conception of womenâs sexuality revolves around themselves and to what degree they believe women are âcooperatingâ with their expectations.Â
For example, when I was being abused by a man, me trying to assert my identity as a lesbian was something he saw as threatening and heâd often pull out really strong manipulation tactics to get me back in line (gaslighting, pretending I never said anything, threatening to out me, feigning injury, threatening to kill himself, etc.). He preferred me to identify as bisexual.
But simultaneously, he didnât respect bisexuality either. He would go through my computer when I wasnât there and get angry at me if I had any evidence in my saved files or computer history of my attraction to women. He didnât want me interacting with other LGBT people. I was forbidden from drag shows and gay clubs. He clearly didnât actually want me to be bisexual. In his mind, bisexuality meant that I had no âreasonâ to leave him because I was capable of attraction to men, and therefore should surrender attraction to women because it was âunneededâ within a monogamous context.
Bisexuality, to abusive straight men, is basically a state where you have no right to turn them down because youâre theoretically capable of attraction. And that entitlement, in my opinion, is where a huge amount of abuse bi women face comes from. This idea that their sexuality is one that needs constant punishment to keep in line and to prevent them from âbecoming lesbianâ (which to the abuser just means âable to get awayâ). I think thatâs why male abusers are so aggressive towards their bi partners when they have lesbian friends. Lesbians are seen as an inherently corrupting influence, as in the abuserâs mind, they havenât been properly punished into submission and now arenât attached to men as a class at all, which is threatening.
Straight women, on the other hand, are willing to acknowledge attraction moreso than they are willing to acknowledge connection to womanhood as a class.Â
Straight women will try to convince questioning women that they too are straight, and will try to soften and accommodate attraction within the safety of straight womanhood, but if that fails and you actually do claim an identity label of bisexual or lesbian, straight women are quick to conceptualize you as outside of womanhood. This is most obvious with how straight women talk about and interact with butches, and the insistence that weâre âbasically menâ but it occurs on a spectrum of subtly for all women who love women.Â
You quickly notice after coming out that the invisible rules of womanhood as a gender no longer apply to you. Physical touch, shared changing spaces, conversations about romance, conversations about men as a class, how you dress, whether you wear make up, whether you shaveâ all of these things will suddenly become highly scrutinized and the invisible rules of what is acceptable and unacceptable between women is noticeably different for you. You will be subtly divorced from womanhood, and then assumed your ideas about feminism and womanhood as a class are lesser or irrelevant because of this perceived distance.Â
The differences between bisexual and lesbian- to the straight woman- are muted by whatever attraction a bi woman is currently speaking to (and by whatever degree an individual bi woman is gender nonconforming or unapologetic in her feminism).Â
Straight people might act as if they would accept lesbians over bi women (âtheyâre seen as threatening non-women who lure âgoodâ women to their âsideâ and hated for it, but straights arenât trying to actively erase part of their identityâ) or visa versa (âtheyâre seen as âflawedâ straight women who can be forced or coerced into line, so as long as they perform for homophobes they can be conditionally acceptedâ) but it doesnât take long to figure out that neither of these is actually acceptance, and their treatment of us has more to do with how weâre currently behaving and much less to do with our actual identities.Â
They create an illusion that they might treat us better if we identified one way or the other, and itâs unfortunately very effective at turning us against each other. But ultimately, homophobes are going to hate us for our attraction to women and for our distrust of men no matter how we identify.Â
We are inherently disobeying the rules of the class of âwomanâ and the reaction for all of us (though taking different forms in different contexts) is that men seek to abuse us back into that class and women seek to quarantine us as a separate gender altogether.Â
