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May. 25th, 2010 09:15 pmSo we went over the chapter on Love and Relationships in my Psychology of Women course today. And it was generally no worse than I expected it to be, especially since there's a chunk of the chapter on lesbian relationships near the end and it's pretty good at not being heteronormative so I don't feel completely erased most of the time.
Except for this: as a class activity, we were asked to write down a list of qualities we wanted in a person we'd want to marry, and then a list of qualities we'd want in a person we'd want to have sex with. Fine. I can do the first one, anyway, at least in theory; and I figured I could just ignore the second one since there's no way in which it applied to me. But then we were instructed to break up in groups with at least one guy in them (this class is maybe 90% female) and discuss the characteristics we put down. Okay, I thought. Fine. I'll just... try to unobtrusively get through the discussion without sharing anything. (I'm not sure whether it could have worked--I'm normally pretty talkative and loud in that class, but on the other hand it was a pretty freaking big group, maybe twenty people.)
And then the girl next to me, who I've been snarking and chatting with off and on since class started, asks me what I put down. Which... er. I ended up saying that I identified as asexual so I really didn't have anything to put down, and she seemed to confuse that with identifying as genderless (and asked me "when did I decide") so I spent most of the rest of the allotted time for discussion clarifying that. It ended well, but I wasn't planning to come out in that class except to the professor (which I already have done, through an email about asexual-as-orientation vs. asexual-as-"intersex"-status), and I felt more than a bit blindsided by the whole thing--and also really, really invisible, because it was clear from the exercise that people who weren't sexually attracted to others were just not considered at all. Which on one level I get--yay visibility, and this is why--but at the same time it's rather depressing.
Except for this: as a class activity, we were asked to write down a list of qualities we wanted in a person we'd want to marry, and then a list of qualities we'd want in a person we'd want to have sex with. Fine. I can do the first one, anyway, at least in theory; and I figured I could just ignore the second one since there's no way in which it applied to me. But then we were instructed to break up in groups with at least one guy in them (this class is maybe 90% female) and discuss the characteristics we put down. Okay, I thought. Fine. I'll just... try to unobtrusively get through the discussion without sharing anything. (I'm not sure whether it could have worked--I'm normally pretty talkative and loud in that class, but on the other hand it was a pretty freaking big group, maybe twenty people.)
And then the girl next to me, who I've been snarking and chatting with off and on since class started, asks me what I put down. Which... er. I ended up saying that I identified as asexual so I really didn't have anything to put down, and she seemed to confuse that with identifying as genderless (and asked me "when did I decide") so I spent most of the rest of the allotted time for discussion clarifying that. It ended well, but I wasn't planning to come out in that class except to the professor (which I already have done, through an email about asexual-as-orientation vs. asexual-as-"intersex"-status), and I felt more than a bit blindsided by the whole thing--and also really, really invisible, because it was clear from the exercise that people who weren't sexually attracted to others were just not considered at all. Which on one level I get--yay visibility, and this is why--but at the same time it's rather depressing.
