I don’t have photoshop on this computer

My aesthetic is bisexual acceptance regardless of the gender of the bisexual person or their significant other.

I think straight men generally don’t view women as autonomous, especially with regards to our attraction and sexuality. We divide ourselves by identity and experience, but they don’t clearly differentiate between women who aren’t currently expressing a willingness to be pursued by men. 

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. I’ve read that even straight women are frequently accused of being lesbians by male abusers, and of course we’ve 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 women’s sexuality revolves around themselves and to what degree they believe women are “cooperating” with their expectations. 

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 he’d 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 didn’t respect bisexuality either. He would go through my computer when I wasn’t there and get angry at me if I had any evidence in my saved files or computer history of my attraction to women. He didn’t want me interacting with other LGBT people. I was forbidden from drag shows and gay clubs. He clearly didn’t actually want me to be bisexual. In his mind, bisexuality meant that I had no “reason” to leave him because I was capable of attraction to men, and therefore should surrender attraction to women because it was “unneeded” within a monogamous context.

Bisexuality, to abusive straight men, is basically a state where you have no right to turn them down because you’re 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 “becoming lesbian” (which to the abuser just means “able to get away”). I think that’s 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 abuser’s mind, they haven’t been properly punished into submission and now aren’t 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. 

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 we’re “basically men” but it occurs on a spectrum of subtly for all women who love women. 

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 shave– 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. 

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). 

Straight people might act as if they would accept lesbians over bi women (”they’re seen as threatening non-women who lure ‘good’ women to their ‘side’ and hated for it, but straights aren’t trying to actively erase part of their identity”) or visa versa (“they’re seen as ‘flawed’ straight women who can be forced or coerced into line, so as long as they perform for homophobes they can be conditionally accepted”) but it doesn’t take long to figure out that neither of these is actually acceptance, and their treatment of us has more to do with how we’re currently behaving and much less to do with our actual identities. 

They create an illusion that they might treat us better if we identified one way or the other, and it’s 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. 

We are inherently disobeying the rules of the class of ‘woman’ 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. 

It’s a good time to remember that “trans mlm” are just fujoshi, and are as equally as homophobic and gross as the rest of them. It doesn’t matter if you don’t self-identify with the fujoshi label, you’re still a homophobic little shit.

Actually, trans mlm are just gay guys, but thanks for trying!

how can you have your head so far up your own ass to claim that gay guys are fetishizing themselves

op: why would someone dfab say they're a man?

op: why might they say they experience body dysphoria and seek hormone therapy and/or surgery to alleviate it?

op: ....

op: ....

op: the only logical explanation is that they're women too fuckin' obsessed with yaoi