#authenticity machine broke

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I was going through old screenshots and discovered this exchange between me and @paradife-loft 

[fatalism-and-villainy]

It’s interesting thinking about common narratives about queer self-discovery, and the way in which heteronormativity assumes the only available kind of subjectivity is a straight one, and queerness is always Other - and the kinds of jokes people will make, like “I thought I was straight for years and so did my friends, now tell me whose identity is a phase” - 

Because the thing is, I don’t think I ever thought I was straight?  

I don’t mean in the sense of “I’ve known since I was 5,” the way some people do (good god no), but in the sense that there was never a time when I consciously aligned myself with heterosexuality and the normality of it, because I’ve simply never been “normal”. Like, growing up aromantic, I certainly didn’t relate to the way the girls around me were crushing on boys; I was autistic and sort of disqualified from girlhood the way so many are, particularly around puberty and adolescence; even once i started “experiencing” “attraction” (to “men”), I think the fact that I wasn’t very good at communal bonding with other women (see above) made that attraction feel not particularly straight. And because boys in general weren’t particularly interested in me that way (that I could tell), I didn’t feel much pressure to enact heterosexuality in my actions.

My engagement with queer stuff started at a relatively young age - I remember researching the different identities that existed at around age 11 or so - so I was already well acquainted with it as a discursive possibility. (I think around middle school age I vaguely wondered if I was a lesbian, but knew that didn’t feel right, but that rejection wasn’t accompanied by adopting an oppositional straight identity.) And around the age of 16 or so, realizing I was capable of being attracted to women felt like a major revelation, but not because I’d always had inclinations in that direction that I’d suppressed, or because it negated anything I had previously thought about myself re: having a straight identity. In some ways, it felt completely involuntary, like something that had suddenly sprung into being in me. However, I’d long had a strong identification with the concept of bisexuality, so part of the reason this realization was startling to me was because it qualified me to adopt a label I’d long had a yearning for, rather than anything to do with gender. 

So - I don’t think there was a particular time in my development when I explicitly identified myself with a straight identity. And a large part of this was because I didn’t feel like I had that much intelligibility in terms of sexual attraction - my attraction to others was never assumed a part of me by others, or something I had to articulate in a social setting. Additionally, in my relationship to the concept of sexual orientation, I always had a leaning towards bisexuality as a concept (and it was often involved in my imaginings of future relationships with men), to the point where it almost feels like the actual signifieds of that label (tangible experiences of attraction) are something that I caused within myself because of my desire to aspire to the ideal set up by the label. 

So.... I guess I gamed the system? 

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Not a personal fan of defenses of being bi that enforce some kind of stability or concrete aspect to bi identity

[fatalism-and-villainy]

something something “wanting to be a certain gender (or wanting to trouble the social categories of gender) is what causes one to be that gender” is far more palpable to me/true to my experiences than “wanting to be a certain gender is a sign that one is truly that gender/was that gender all along”

[fatalism-and-villainy]

so I think the sentiments I expressed in this post might actually be connected to why I find the trope of “couple flirting with a third person together by kissing/engaging in other sexual-coded behaviour with each other” to be so hot and emotionally appealing? Because it’s engaging with the cultural framework of “the couple as a [sexual] unit for others’ consumption,” but in a subversive manner by heavily foregrounding the “sexual” part in a way that’s not considered decent or appropriate for others’ eyes. And it’s also sort of reaffirming the privacy/hidden layers of attachment in the relationship by only performing that element of it for one particular person, which I think it why it hits me so hard.    

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I have sort of a working theory as to the gender-attraction situation - 

see, I’ve been doing.... some flirting, in the past few months? and kind of have a sense of “intuitively picking up on the energy that you’re both giving off and feeding off of that in your interactions.” So like - I do have some understanding of the whole “I just got a vibe!” thing, and I don’t think it’s just neurotypical bullshit. But I’ve never engaged in that kind of behaviour with a girl, and I’m not really sure how I would ever pick up on those vibes coming from a girl. It’s just sort of.... a blank space, trying to imagine it. And I’ve heard testimonies from queer women I know to whom that kind of thing has been pretty intuitive, or, even if there’s doubt, as intuitive as my kinds of interactions with men. 

But I think what bothers me, or what I find profoundly unrelatable about narratives re: women relating to each other in a way that signifies that there is a mutual attraction, is that so much of it (again, just from what I’ve heard) seems to be based in emotional connection.

Like, when a friend was talking about first meeting her (now ex) girlfriend, she said she could just tell they were flirting, and when I asked how, she said, “well, part of it was that I was relating to her in a way that I would with someone I’d known for a long time.” Which really confuses me still, because that’s really not how I think about flirting at all (I could maybe see it if it was about touching and physical intimacy, but not emotional intimacy).* And several other currently-partnered women I know have described their experiences of meeting/having that kind of “we’re attracted to each other” vibe with their current girlfriends, as forming really deep emotional bonds really quickly and just wanting to hang out all the time. 

And like - I just don’t think I think about attraction, even of the romantic variety, in that way at all? Even if I feel emotional attraction to someone, it’s not really based in the intensity of the bonding I’ve had with them, but rather more of a response to the intensity of my internal sensations and the reciprocity of the attraction (or lack thereof) from the other person. 

And for me, flirting is.... heavily performative? it’s not about being authentic, or feeling an emotional connection right away - it’s more bantering, deliberately putting on a show of confidence, being hyperaware of everything you’re doing. Kind of the exact opposite of the experiences being described here. And like.... I just feel like men tend more towards that than women? I know it’s a thing in a lot of women’s interpersonal interactions to go straight for the personal, emotional stuff, and I feel like with men there’s more distance that allows for the kind of flirtatious interaction that feels the most right to me. Which might be part of why I’m not feeling many emotional impulses towards women right now.

*This same person also described how they ended up spending ten hours together on their first date, which doesn’t sound at all desirable to me - especially if I had those feelings towards someone? Because being around someone I’m strongly attracted to is just sensorily overwhelming after awhile, and I need/want time to process it on my own, same as anything else. But that’s a tangent.  

[fatalism-and-villainy]

further aro pontification - 

still not sure what to do about the fact that I am capable of feeling something that can only be approximated as romantic attraction, and the fact that I continue to be very disgruntled by cultural narratives around romance, and the expectations attached to romantic relationships

like, I’ve felt the butterflies! I’ve experienced the near-obsessive dwelling on a person (a kind of object permanency that hasn’t really been present with my past crushes*)! I’ve experienced the oscillation between giddiness and devastation, both extremes very disproportionate to the actual events that engendered them! I understand the media and narratives a little bit better now!

And yet... I still feel a vague disgruntlement with the expectations as to how I am expected to deal with these feelings, the relationship structure I am meant to desire. I think partially because I don’t like the idea of putting a label on these Feelings I’ve experienced, such that they are open for public consumption or reified as a means of organizing my life? And also because when I ask people about their own experiences with Romance, and how they identify it/know they’re feeling it, their responses, while often in line with general cultural narratives, never feel very satisfactory to me, or like ways in which I would be oriented.  

(Like, I asked a friend recently what the difference was between having feelings for someone and “just” being sexually attracted to them, and they said that the first one constituted a particular kind of drive to prioritize the other person’s needs - the example given being, if you were at a party that you were really enjoying, but your partner wasn’t having a good time, you would want to leave early with them; or alternatively, if you weren’t having a good time, but your partner was, you would want to stay for their sake. And when i asked, for clarification, “so you would actively feel the emotional urge to do those things? you wouldn’t just do them because they fit the expectations of the relationship you had both agreed to?” they said it was the first one.

I can’t quite articulate why this explanation makes me feel vaguely disgruntled - I think perhaps that appeal to authenticity, the idea of relationship structures arising from “organic” feelings, as opposed to the opposite; or perhaps the idea of defining emotions as action-based, since “you know you’re feeling x because you want to do y,” which has never quite worked for me; or perhaps how vaguely monogamy-influenced the entire idea feels.)

Like, idk, maybe it’s Not That Deep and I just want to engage in casual dating and flirting and courtship rituals without being in a Serious Relationship, because I’m still pretty young and inexperienced and feel like I missed out on the fun stuff in high school and my undergrad. And I need to do so among people who aren’t inclined towards monogamy, and who won’t thoughtlessly conflate commitment with exclusivity (because another one of my friends did that recently, and it hurt me more than I realized at the time).  

(And ofc there’s still the question of Do I Want To Date Girls, which I’m not sure I’ll even be able to answer unless I just try it out... but I have to say that the idea is vaguely unappealing to me, even though I’m definitely attracted to them by any reasonable set of standards. I can’t tell if it’s for dysphoria reasons, or just because I’m still hung up on this particular boy and have trouble imaging the possibility of reorienting my feelings (both very possible), but it is unfortunate given that there are considerably fewer men that I find attractive. BUT within queer and poly spaces I feel there’s bound to be more men that I’m into, so.) 

*I have to wonder if the intensity of this, compared to my previous attraction to people, is at least somewhat attributable to the fact that the attraction was reciprocal, in this case? And I’ve had people tell me that attraction/emotional investment deepening when it’s returned is pretty common, and isn’t just a result of me having Baggage, so.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Tbh discourse about political lesbianism makes me uncomfortable a decent amount of the time because while political lesbianism is mostly garbage, I feel that the critiques of it tend to veer away from the weird assumption that who you fuck determines the demographic you politically prioritize, or the fact that political lesbians (mainly historically but also currently) tend to be incredibly homophobic and anti-sex, and towards this kind of weird gatekeeping, à la “it’s offensive to women who are ACTUALLY attracted to women!” or “do you even have sex with women?” Like, coming into an identity in an oblique, roundabout way, because the terminology and societal positioning of it resonates with you, is a totally legit way to come into an identity - it’s a big part of me coming into the bi label - and attraction can follow as a consequence of that identification. Trying to gatekeep what counts as “genuine” attraction, or “legitimate” reasons to identify with something, should not be the priority here.