This 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?