so two months after i turned 18 i moved halfway across the country to go to college, and i finally came out as bisexual - not just to these new people that didn’t know me, but to myself. i am still not out to my parents, and this is just a personal choice. i am very fortunate that my family would be incredibly supportive and welcoming if i were to come out to them, but i’m still nervous, and i don’t want it to be a big deal - and knowing my parents, it will be. a good deal, but a big one.
anyway, i am 28 now, and i still often categorize my attraction to women as “liking girls,” because it feels ... less abrasive? it feels more gentle than saying i’m sexually attracted to women. less of a shock to the system or something. recently i have been more open about wanting to, u know, get rawed by ruth negga (she’s the most beautiful woman in the world but i have never seen one of her movies or heard her speak. don’t @ me)
see ! even there. she’s the most beautiful woman. she’s not hot. she’s not sexy. i am uncomfortable saying that women are hot or sexy, even when they are and even when i want to absolutely fuck them. it’s unintentional, this “lessening” of my specifically sexual attraction (not to say im not attracted to women for other reason as well).
i think i have trouble with saying things like this, with admitting even to myself sometimes that women are in fact sexy and hot and anything other than “beautiful” and “ethereal” (which they also are), is because when i was growing up bisexual girls were seen very much as “just doing it for attention” - specifically male attention. idk if this is still the case, but im sure in many places it is.
girls kissed at parties in order to impress boys, to get their attention, and to prop themselves up as sexual creatures w/o being named a slut for sleeping with a lot of guys or whatever. and in order to distance myself from that idea (which is largely false, like i’ve never met a girl who kissed other girls “for attention from boys” w/o actually later coming out as being wlw), i painted my very sexual attraction to women as “liking girls”
u know what im talking about, if you’re of an age similar, or even if you aren’t. but i think the climate has changed in younger generations, and i’m really glad about it because i realize a lot of people on tumblr are a lot younger than i am, and i really hope that they’re also comfortable with the fact that they want to have sex with women instead of just, like, holding hands with a girl in a really sweet and completely non-sexual way. i’m not saying u should be ready to do the do, but being comfortable with your attraction to other women/girls is like ....... man it’s probably a great feeling !
i’m getting there. i am much more open about my sexuality, and i try very hard not to get caught up in the idea that my attraction to women is just “innocent”, because it isn’t. being sexually attracted to women is a large part of my identity, something i’m working on becoming more comfortable with.
in order to, so to speak, protect myself from ridicule or doubt, i didn’t come out for a long time, and by that i mean i didn’t admit these feelings to myself either. i had lesbian friends, gay friends, but no other bi friends. even they sometimes made jokes about bisexual people, that they just needed to pick a side, or they were doing it for attention. i mean we were in high school, high schoolers say dumb shit, but even as i grew up and became an adult that mindset seemed to prevail in a lot of my peers.
you see bi women on tinder or whatever with messages from dudes just asking for threesomes. you see gay and lesbian people say that they’d never be in a relationship with someone who’s bi. i think taking the sexuality out of bisexuality has been a defense mechanism for a lot of people, myself clearly included. if our attraction isn’t seen as sexual, then maybe people won’t think we’re doing it for attention, or that we’re promiscuous by default, or whatever.
i can’t speak to what it’s like for lesbians to take the sexuality out of their orientation, but i feel like maybe it’s similar. that if our sexuality is seen as innocent, as not involving sex at all, maybe people won’t be so harsh. maybe the world will welcome us a bit more softly if they don’t know that we are very much sexually attracted to other women, that it’s not just innocent.
i feel, especially for people of my generation and older, the idea that being bi or lesbian was seen as such a sexual deviancy, that some of us did and still do try to paint our attraction as non-sexual in order to appear non-threatening. i know this is also the case in many places, that being in the community is seen as sexually deviant, but i also know that times have, slowly, agonizingly, been changing in a lot of places. and with that change, that the community fights tooth and nail every day for, i hope that younger generations are more comfortable expressing their sexual attraction to women to themselves.
it really sucks when you look at a woman, ruth negga for example, and your immediate thought is “she’s very hot. please raw me ruth negga” and then you self correct to “no !! she’s beautiful !! i only want to hold her hand !” it’s like you monitor yourself even in your own head, and that really, really does not feel good.
anyway idk where i’m going with this anymore, but i guess the point is that being sexually attracted to women is okay, and it’s okay to view women as sexy and hot. i guess if there’s any advice i have, it’s to try not to let other people dictate what parts of your attraction to women are acceptable.
