I knew I was doing something wrong but didn’t know what.
I’d never had a boyfriend or even slept with a man, and I didn’t particularly like going on dates with men or hanging out with them, but I thought that was normal - all of my friends constantly complained about the guys they were dating. Until then, I had assumed I was straight I was just really, really bad at it. I was excited to meet her, but it was all happening so fast (if you don’t include the 28 confused years preceding it).
I had sent Lydia the first message, asking to read the gay Harry Potter fanfic she had mentioned in her profile. It would be my first-ever date with a woman, made approximately 10 days after I came out to friends as “not straight, but I’ll get back to you on exactly how much” at the age of 28. Our first date was for drinks on a Monday night after a workday I had spent trying not to throw up from anxiety. This may be because we still live in a culture that not only presents straightness to us as compulsory, but specifically penalises women who openly flout its conventions.Lydia and I met thanks to a quiz, the multiple-choice OkCupid personality assessment, which asks for your thoughts on matters like “Would a nuclear Holocaust be exciting?” (that’s a “no” from me) and then matches you with those you’re least likely to hate. In fact, in experiments where women are asked to watch lesbian porn and report on their experience of it, whilst also having their genital response measured separately, straight-identifying women tend to report nonchalance or disinterest even when their physical responses show marked arousal.
"Based on the responses from volunteers in sexual arousal research, women are, on average, sexually aroused to both male and female sexual stimuli, regardless of their sexual orientation," UK researchers explain in the paper, Sexual Arousal and Masculinity-Femininity of Women. Interestingly though, research suggests while men's brains routinely respond to erotic stimuli in alignment with the sexual orientation they self-identify as, this is rarely the case for women. It found internalised homophobia – NOT sexual attraction – was the most accurate predictor of straight identification across people of all age groups and genders. (It could also be argued – and it has been, by numerous academics and authors on the subject – that sexual identity is a social construct, because sexuality is far more complex and nuanced than something we can neatly pack into a box and slap a label on.)Ī 2018 study published in the journal, Social Forces, seems to confirm this. Though it's rarely discussed, research has long suggested very few women are actually straight, at least, not as far as the traditional definition of heterosexuality is concerned. I've found myself on the receiving end of these comments in real-life, too, by well-meaning strangers and peers alike. Since my own coming out, barely a day has passed when I haven't opened social media to see a comment suggesting my queerness is a performance, a cry for attention from men, or a reaction to not being able to find "a good man". Queer women and femme-identifying people face disproportionate discrimination and violence as a result of this, and are additionally far more likely to have our relationships stigmatised, fetishised, and delegitimised. To identify as anything outside of this, and rebel against the idea that appeasing men is the price we pay for admission into the world as women, is to threaten the entire ecosystem of the forest. Instead of recognising what's around us, compulsory heterosexuality (the idea of presenting straightness as a kind of "default setting") teaches women to view ourselves through the lens of the male gaze. That's the thing about heteronormative culture it takes roots in our lives that grow into branches which weave themselves around us so insidiously, we can't see the forest we're walking through.