A schadenfreudal orgasm.

[cruelbitch]

Delightful.

Author's Note: This lengthy diatribe was inspired by a sf-drama post -- a forum I do not attend, nor do I desire becoming invested in -- which elicited a severe twitch of irritation within me. I, very reluctantly, said nothing. After all, why would I, somebody who devotes massive amounts of their time into Dare-I-Say-PC research, ever want to

Comments

[cruelbitch]

See, I enjoy this writing because it covers all the salient bases and compartmentalizes them within a neat rhetorical framework, while still giving legroom to conjoin it with the collective. It's haphazard, like mine, but yet ... not. It's roundabout.

Within heteronormative society, people -- even within the queer community -- are frequently attempting to conceptualize everything in terms of the gender binary. In other words, everyone often tries to make homosexuality as heterosexual as possible; proponents of this essentialist ideology, in addition, also have the vast majority of their straightness centered around these constructions. (This, for the record, ties into your explanation of how socially-constructed gayness is just as plausible as socially-constructed straightness.) Gay men are quite obviously "feminized": because in which other way could their desire to be fucked by men -- the homophobe's way of refining what their orientation must be rooted in -- be rationalized? Lesbian women, alternatively, are "masculinized" -- after all, what explains their desire to fuck women the way men should be fucking them?

Collective society encodes these attitudes within their lexicon, which always betrays them: How passive and active, dominant and submissive, penetrative and receptive, are often used to describe what is defined as inherent to basic, heterosexual relations. This, of course, transcends in how they approach non-sexual behaviors -- women are not only passive sexually, but psychologically. Men not only exert physical strength in the public labor sphere, and jackhammer the ground -- if I must be glib -- but within her.

This, by proxy, afflicts how attitudes are represented in the homosexual domestic sphere, including within childrearing -- division of household labor should, apparently, be determined by who subscribes to their respective complementary role of gender. Of course, observational data demonstrates the opposite of this transpiring within same-sex relationships, but that certainly doesn't stop the Ambiguous Heteronormative Collective (this is wry, of course) from believing otherwise. Similarly to everything else.

Which leads us back into how this cannot be divorced from sexuality. Bisexuals hardly merit a second glance -- after all, they're just confused, mired in ambiguity, and will eventually "settle down" into their respective norm: the normative heterosexual role, or the normative homosexual role. Gay men are Like The Women: fucking eachother the way only women should be fucked. Lesbian women, on the other hand, are fucking eachother when none of them should be doing the fucking in the first place! But if you may, allow us to manufacture you some dildos, "flesh"-colored and stippled with veins along the phallus.

(Another off-topic thing: Ever notice how in scientific descriptions of female animals with enlarged clitorises -- such as the spotted hyena -- it's described as a "pseudo-phallus"? I wonder, then, why penises aren't described as "pseudo-clitorises", given what they're constructed from. And also, on the male-normative skeleton, you can feminize it by adding some lipstick and a pink ribbon, Ms. Pacman style. Interesting paradoxes everpresent.)

Transpeople dismantle this category even further, throwing even secretly-essentialist feminists into a frenzy: far more emphasis is placed on Gender Identity Disorder rather than Body Dysphoria. And when you pepper asexuality into the concoction, it ties together nicely: Men should want to be fucking, and women should want to be fucked -- better still, they should at least desire fucking eachother within normative parameters, with gendered caveats applied. If they don't, the reasoning must also be rooted in sex; inadequate sex, abusive sex, stubborn puritanical sex-hating abstinence.