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#bc gay men are not a monolith and being a gay man does not inherently mean one must adhere to certain affectations????
telumendils · 2 months
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ppl will really say shit like "astarion can't be attracted to women just look at the way he behaves" with their whole chest like they're not blatantly stereotyping gay men and erasing vast swathes of bisexual and pansexual men when they do that.
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cruelsister-moved2 · 1 year
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its crazy bc plenty of bi women I really relate to and feel like our experiences overlap vastly more than they differ but an equal amount of bi women's experiences are just very different to mine and we barely have anything more in common than I do with straight women and there's nothing wrong with that idk at what point insecure people decided to use lesbians as a yardstick for validity and if we don't pretend to relate to you, you accuse us of gatekeeping or something despite us being the smaller group. I have limited experiences in common with straight women or gay men or trans men too, but I still want them to thrive and especially to be in relationships where they're treated with respect.
there's no reason to forcibly conflate them and I feel like not only does it always fuel infighting by confining everyone in a small space and forcing them to get along, but it always leads to deciding someone isn't a Real bi woman and doesn't really experience whatever attraction they say they do because they're like annoying or unrelatable or unsympathetic to an audience of lesbians and other bi women. but we already recognised that trying to draw a line on who is enough to count and who isn't is a bad idea. wouldn't it be more productive to recognise the inherent diversity in the bi label that represents a spectrum of identities rather than a monolith. I genuinely think there's so much confusion bc we can't get our heads around the fact that one bi woman might relate more to a lesbian than to another bi woman or vice versa.
it's like weirdly essentialist to imagine that simply experiencing attraction to another woman or to a man in your head in any capacity would fundamentally alter your position in the world. we kind of get this with bi men because there are bi men who exist mostly in the straight world, bi men who largely inhabit the gay community, who move through both, who create their own bisexual circles, etc. but for some reason when it comes to bi women our collective imaginations can only come up with a quirky tradwife or basically just a lesbian. and you expect bi women and lesbians to do all the labour to work this contradiction out but I just think conception of bisexuality as a parallel identity to lesbianism or heterosexuality is always going to end up marginalising one aspect of someone's experience because it really is best conceptualised as more a wide spectrum of identities than one specific thing.
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