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sciatrixThis post has been adapted from a Metafilter discussion about emotional labor, in which the question of why straight women still put up with men in the absence of equitable emotional, mental, and physical labor divisions came up. Someone brought up the possibility of reviving political lesbianism as a potential solution, and I had some thoughts.
So political lesbianism is a really different thing from "I am opting out of men," largely because it by definition involves redefining sexual orientation from "this is a descriptive rundown of my wants and desires" to "this is a political definition of the things that I think I ought to want." It muddies the game both for women who are actually sexually/romantically interested in other women and for women who want to set up families and households with other women irrespective of their actual sexual desires, and it has one hell of a problematic history when you look into the nitty gritty details.
(Political asexuality also very briefly popped up in at least one place in 1977, and I'm kind of glad now that it never caught on: my descriptive lists of the things I actually want enable me to find other people who actually want me and what I represent in a way that lists of what people think they ought to want don't.)
I'm all for people choosing to organize their families and households around the most emotionally fulfilling relationships for them, and I mean, I don't at a gut level understand the difference between friendship and romance once the limerence wears off. I certainly can't criticize anyone for choosing to set up their households and their chosen adult families around other types of relationships. But political lesbianism is not a good way to achieve that.
Let me try to dig into what I'm trying to say a little more clearly.
Orientation is a way of describing what we want when we reach out for connection with another person, either sexually or in terms of the initial butterflies wanting of feelings like crushes. It's a way of describing what we want when we say we're hungry for a type of contact.
But humans hunger for a lot of things, and sometimes not everything we want is available to us, or at least not available from any one person. So sometimes we reach out to get our needs met in different ways--our emotional needs and connections met by romantic partners, or friends, or sexual partners, or family and kin, or or or or. And what other people are willing to invest in us, that matters too. If we find that what we want is never available when we reach out, if it's being barred to us not by an external boundary but because it doesn't seem to be present to the touch, we as humans can and do think about different ways to structure our lives to get our emotional and physical and sexual needs for intimacy and contact met. We have an amazing variety of ways that different cultures and different individual people have devised to fill that hunger for connection. (Sometimes we tie sex to those things, and sometimes we don't, and that goes for pretty much every combination of genders you can imagine across cultures.)
When we talk about setting up relationships to feed one another with that desire for human connection, though, it's also important to note that individual dyadic relationships can be fragile and that stress can fray them. Those dyadic relationships need tending and work to flourish. So human cultures tend to grow up around providing structure to those privileged relationships in order to allow them to be structured and maintained. The problem is that most cultures have historically provided that kind of support along kin lines, and that Western society has shifted away from that along the (quite correct) notion that if your kin is kind of shitty, you're totally fucked by that system if you can't find another source of support. Except that a lot of the societal prioritization of supportive relationships has then shifted instead to romantic (assumed sexual, assumed monogamous) relationships instead. Which tends to center the need for support around a single dyadic romantic relationship instead of spreading it around more diffuse connections, and if it breaks... or your romantic relationship isn't equally distributing affection and support and connective maintenance....
well, you're shit out of luck.
I think the way to go about changing this isn't to change what we mean by orientation, because I don't think that losing the clarity of describing exactly what you want is a way forward. (At least, unless you pick up a mixed-attraction model, but that's something that doesn't seem to be very popular outside of ace and bi/pan communities, where desire-for-connection and desire-for-sex are less likely to align.) I think that what you want instead is to support people who reorganize how they prioritize and invest sexual and emotional connection.
And I think that is happening to some extent, but I think the conversation usually ends at "step back and disinvest from what is not working" and doesn't always include "step forward in this direction and find people who want something similar to you so you can find at least one compatible person," especially for straight people. I think that needs to be a bigger part of our conversations about emotional labor, and I think the need for a term to describe "the effort we put into maintaining our connections to one another" has yanked the term "emotional labor" to attach itself to because of that cultural shift towards choosing our connections to one another and looking for connection and yield in response to emotional investment.
I have no idea how to popularize those concepts for older straight women, though, so.... uh, mazel tov if you can?
So political lesbianism is a really different thing from "I am opting out of men," largely because it by definition involves redefining sexual orientation from "this is a descriptive rundown of my wants and desires" to "this is a political definition of the things that I think I ought to want." It muddies the game both for women who are actually sexually/romantically interested in other women and for women who want to set up families and households with other women irrespective of their actual sexual desires, and it has one hell of a problematic history when you look into the nitty gritty details.
(Political asexuality also very briefly popped up in at least one place in 1977, and I'm kind of glad now that it never caught on: my descriptive lists of the things I actually want enable me to find other people who actually want me and what I represent in a way that lists of what people think they ought to want don't.)
I'm all for people choosing to organize their families and households around the most emotionally fulfilling relationships for them, and I mean, I don't at a gut level understand the difference between friendship and romance once the limerence wears off. I certainly can't criticize anyone for choosing to set up their households and their chosen adult families around other types of relationships. But political lesbianism is not a good way to achieve that.
Let me try to dig into what I'm trying to say a little more clearly.
Orientation is a way of describing what we want when we reach out for connection with another person, either sexually or in terms of the initial butterflies wanting of feelings like crushes. It's a way of describing what we want when we say we're hungry for a type of contact.
But humans hunger for a lot of things, and sometimes not everything we want is available to us, or at least not available from any one person. So sometimes we reach out to get our needs met in different ways--our emotional needs and connections met by romantic partners, or friends, or sexual partners, or family and kin, or or or or. And what other people are willing to invest in us, that matters too. If we find that what we want is never available when we reach out, if it's being barred to us not by an external boundary but because it doesn't seem to be present to the touch, we as humans can and do think about different ways to structure our lives to get our emotional and physical and sexual needs for intimacy and contact met. We have an amazing variety of ways that different cultures and different individual people have devised to fill that hunger for connection. (Sometimes we tie sex to those things, and sometimes we don't, and that goes for pretty much every combination of genders you can imagine across cultures.)
When we talk about setting up relationships to feed one another with that desire for human connection, though, it's also important to note that individual dyadic relationships can be fragile and that stress can fray them. Those dyadic relationships need tending and work to flourish. So human cultures tend to grow up around providing structure to those privileged relationships in order to allow them to be structured and maintained. The problem is that most cultures have historically provided that kind of support along kin lines, and that Western society has shifted away from that along the (quite correct) notion that if your kin is kind of shitty, you're totally fucked by that system if you can't find another source of support. Except that a lot of the societal prioritization of supportive relationships has then shifted instead to romantic (assumed sexual, assumed monogamous) relationships instead. Which tends to center the need for support around a single dyadic romantic relationship instead of spreading it around more diffuse connections, and if it breaks... or your romantic relationship isn't equally distributing affection and support and connective maintenance....
well, you're shit out of luck.
I think the way to go about changing this isn't to change what we mean by orientation, because I don't think that losing the clarity of describing exactly what you want is a way forward. (At least, unless you pick up a mixed-attraction model, but that's something that doesn't seem to be very popular outside of ace and bi/pan communities, where desire-for-connection and desire-for-sex are less likely to align.) I think that what you want instead is to support people who reorganize how they prioritize and invest sexual and emotional connection.
And I think that is happening to some extent, but I think the conversation usually ends at "step back and disinvest from what is not working" and doesn't always include "step forward in this direction and find people who want something similar to you so you can find at least one compatible person," especially for straight people. I think that needs to be a bigger part of our conversations about emotional labor, and I think the need for a term to describe "the effort we put into maintaining our connections to one another" has yanked the term "emotional labor" to attach itself to because of that cultural shift towards choosing our connections to one another and looking for connection and yield in response to emotional investment.
I have no idea how to popularize those concepts for older straight women, though, so.... uh, mazel tov if you can?
no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 11:35 pm (UTC)For a start, I just want to point out that the failure to have alternatives to kin and sexual/romantic relationships as predicates for support is something patriarchy is deeply invested in. This is a way of keeping women and children and subaltern men chattels. I wrote a post on this a long time ago. I'll go look up the link for you. [ETA: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/377938.html ]
For another, I want to warn you: the allosexuals are lying. You write from a perspective informed by how allosexuals represent the role of sex in their relationships (particularly in the emotional lives of their relationships) and it's incorrect because they are lying about that. Most of all to themselves, but also to everybody else as collateral damage. Sexual desire and interpersonal attraction is way, way, WAY more central and organizing for them than they (i.e. our society at large) admit. This is why allosexuals are so damn squirrelly in the head about wanting/needing/expecting sex of their partners, and also then (esp in mixed-orientation relationships) deny having those feels.
Note that the documentary I just wrote about? Since a bunch of the medical disasters involve women's gynecological health, it winds up touching, pretty lightly, on the fact that when a woman (presumed allosexual) can no longer safely (for her or her partner) engage in PIV intercourse, that can be the death of her partnership, and utterly devastating to her even when her partner stays.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 12:12 am (UTC)This definition really spoke to me, thank you!
Thanks for writing this all out - I'm going to be thinking about it for a while.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 12:21 am (UTC)Honestly I've just become a wholehearted advocate for the split attraction model to everyone all the time, because I truly think that's the core concept that will get this across. But I admit to not understanding the allosexuals at all, so.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 07:23 am (UTC)With my husband, I've found/trained someone who avoids many of the terrible traits associated with being a man in this culture. I wasn't interested in a relationship until I found someone like that, and I met my emotional needs elsewhere.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 04:28 pm (UTC)and reminds me that yeah, people were asking the same kinds of questions about the 2004 election as the 2016 one. (including me going "who the fuck is my country anyway")
no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 09:25 pm (UTC)Mixed-attraction models likely come out of the Klein grid, which inherits many of the same problems as the Kinsey scale in terms of ciscentrism. At any rate, opposition mixed-attraction models strikes me as grounded in "ace discourse," which is very young, and very theory-oriented. Most of us who have been around the block at least once on LGB dating acknowledge that "heteroflexible" men/women who are good hook-ups but won't commit emotionally really do exist.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 09:53 pm (UTC)My platonic life partner and I have joked with our girl squad that the goal is to buy one of those lovely, big Victorian mansions and just move all our unmarried female friends in. Who needs men when you have a whole houseful of people who just get you, and won't be tiresomely insecure or jealous about your collectively high levels of intelligence and education.
I suppose that is why the men of yesteryear couldn't handle the idea of women who didn't need them, and just made that possibility straight-up illegal.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 02:10 am (UTC)Like I said, there's some good evidence that we picked them up and borrowed them at the same time as early bi communities. I noticed that a common nomenclature when I was first knocking around in asexual communities c. 2005, 2006ish was 'affectional orientation', which seems to have originated in bisexual communities predating online ace communities by about ten years. As far as we can tell, early ace groups seem to have independently observed the same concept and quickly became aware of the bisexual community version at the same time. In fact, back in 2011 you can see me rolling my eyes at a sexuality professor who brought up the same kind of mixed-attraction person as a way to blow the class' minds about the way that orientation works--and she would absolutely have been coming from broader queer culture, not ace culture.
Trust me, I'm very, very familiar with the past twenty years of discussion both inside asexual spaces and outside them. I've been a part of those communities for nearly fifteen years now. In the broader scheme of things, I agree with you that they are young, and the theory-orientation is something of a cultural hallmark: it's something I view with affection and annoyance by terms, but it's not necessarily bad. I'm dealing with my own personal grar hackles about this particular thing because you are (probably unintentionally) hitting a number of my deeply sore spots about my community.
This is not an "ace discourse"-friendly blog. I do not know how you are intending to use that term, but in my experience it usually refers to a targeted campaign of gaslighting, lying, and harassment aimed at asexual-spectrum people and whether or not folks with this identity are "real" or toxically harmful to "real" queer people. I have enough trauma related to Tumblr-style "ace discourse" as it is--they nearly drove me out of queer spaces entirely c. 2011-2014 and repairing that is still something I am working on even today--that I am not going to put up with it here.
(Also: I promise you I've been "around the block" at least once on relationships and I'm not speaking from theory with respect to my own personal life. My experiences are different to yours, but I will politely thank you not to enter my space and condescend to me about them.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 02:31 am (UTC)Oh yes, I hadn't actually stopped to consider that. It does make sense, though, and that societal/patriarchal investment would definitely also constrain people who are thinking about doing something else.
it's incorrect because they are lying about that. Most of all to themselves, but also to everybody else as collateral damage
I guess it's that "lying to themselves" thing that is hitting me and making me chew on this. Like, a lot of people view sex as a really important way of connecting to their partners and emotionally binding to them, and if you suddenly take that out of the equation completely because of physical pain, it winds up being really painful and traumatizing. But if you're already starving emotionally even with the sex, it seems to me that forming a relationship without it that otherwise meets your needs becomes substantially more attractive. I don't know whether that attractiveness is enough to offset the strong societal censure of women who take that path, though.
I don't know. I see a lot of women, particularly older women, saying "If my relationship ended tomorrow, I would not seek out a new one, because I can meet my social needs elsewhere." Or women who aren't in these relationships wishing they could figure out how to get those emotional and intimacy needs met--I see a lot of complaining and wistfulness about this, and I keep going "YOU DON'T HAVE TO ORGANIZE IT THAT WAY" and "YOU DON'T HAVE TO TANGLE ALL THESE THINGS TOGETHER." If there wasn't active complaining about the tangling, I wouldn't be so bemused, you know?
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 03:25 am (UTC)And I also agree that there's a long shared history of discussion about mixed-attraction models. My point there was just that the Klein Grid was originally published in 1978 and certainly discussed by the time I came on the scene around 1990. I think by then many of us "pigeon holes are for pigeons" people were rejecting quantitative dimensions in favor of qualitative storytelling, but I think biromantic and asexual are both useful terms.
And I wholeheartedly agree with, and personally need new ways of discussing how to build relationships of mutual support and connection. American culture has no words to describe my long-term primary relationship, or many other relationships that are important to who I am. And I apologize for not making that agreement clear from the start.
Edit: I also agree that problems describing sexual orientation inclusive of nonbinary persons is a pretty broad topic, and my criticism there was toward the historic bi community that used the Klein grid. I apologize for not making that explicitly clear as well.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 06:45 am (UTC)So for me, I'm see myself as aligned with other people who look at the risks of dating and come out with "ehhh, not worth it." And interested in having a language towards normalizing non-sexual life partnerships.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-12 06:03 pm (UTC)I think I understand much better now where you're coming from, thank you.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-13 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-13 02:44 am (UTC)I am reminded wryly of the time my (nonbinary, ace-but-not-exactly-not-anything-that-moves, "can fall in love with a rock") partner once straight up forgot that closets existed and was startled and annoyed when straight people made some dumb misconceptions. It's hard having to clarify that context before you can get straight to the conversations that are more interesting sometimes.
Man, I'm sorry I got as tense as I did so fast, too. You didn't actually do anything wrong.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-14 03:15 pm (UTC)