Perish the thought. :dubious:
I understand that, but it’s not a matter of sexual identity that’s causing the problem. It’s a matter of honesty. I think we can all agree that dishonesty isn’t desirable in anyone.
Right, but being GD, I’m gonna ask, “cite!”
It’s one thing to rant about a specific situation where some girl treated another like shit by denying a relationship had any validity, “oh, well, I was just, you know, experimenting. I don’t really like women, so, um, have a nice life.” It’s another to assert that this is generally the case with people who experiment sexually/romanticaly across gender lines without more hard and fast evidence. It just ends up sounding like, well, a rant based on experience or percieved wrongdoing and persecution, as opposed to a rational, debatable point (which, incidentally, is how intra-sexuality infighting and power struggles often seem to me).
I have come across one story of heartbreak after another. Is this evidence that all LUGS are liars and heartbreakers, or just proof that the other cases simply do not get written down?
I don’t know. However, I don’t see any national poll asking about claimed straightness v. real straightness, denial of feelings, and the results decades down the line.
Until such a poll exists, I am willing to go with the consensus found in other message boards/lesbian stereotypes that the cases I propose are the vast majority.
Putting sexuality completely aside, a person who asks themselves if they’re “good enough” to join a group is a wuss, and ridiculing wusses is practically a blood sport in this day and age.
First a stereotypical wedding, then a stereotypical lesbian. I guess they’re just confused what stereotype they want to live up to… :rolleyes:
Or else, they were bisexual in the first place, perhaps?
So, Bisexuals don’t exist any more?
Personally, I don’t get the whole problem with LUGs. So what? Maybe they aren’t sleeping with women anymore. Maybe one day, they’ll do it again. What’s wrong with that? Have you considered that people sometimes need different things at different points in their lives? I think it’s perfectly reasonable that a girl can find both men and women attractive. There are points in her life when she needs to date a certain kind of person (archetypes–someone stronger than her who can take charge, a confidante, a comforter, someone who needs her, etc.). Sometimes that person is a man, sometimes a woman. And yes, perhaps it could screw up a marriage. But heterosexual people screw up their marriages by marrying the wrong type of person all the time.
If someone’s sufficiently superficial and self-involved that they’d walk out of an otherwise healthy, satisfying relationship simply because some sort of inner clock said it was time to stop dallying with women, score a husband, and become a soccer mom - who’d want to be involved with that sort anyway??
The problem with such a person isn’t that she’s a LUG; her problem is that she’s got her head up her ass.
If that’s what Adleman meant, then the underlying issue is either- her poor writing skills, or her defining “lesbian” to mean something that it doesn’t.
But that is not part of the definition of lesbian.
OTTOMH- Lesbian- noun a woman who is exclusively romantically/sexually interested in other women.
A woman does not have to belong to any lesbian organizations in order to be a lesbian. She does not have to participate in any struggle for rights, recognition etc in order to be a lesbian.
No you don’t. Finding acceptance in a group is not necessary to be a lesbian. It certainly makes life easier, but it isn’t necessary.
I think, toadspittle, that the argument being put forth is that these women will actually turn on their ex-lovers, say nasty things to them, and so forth. Which, really, doesn’t seem much different than any other ‘bad’ break-up. And, I still don’t believe that all these relationships end in such a way.
However, her point is not whether she will exist as a lesbian. It is whether she can survive “with a lesbian identity in society.” I’m not at all sure that I comprehend where one goes to establish an “identity” based on sexuality–I would not dream of asking the sexual orientation of a person with whom I was not planning to have sex–but I believe that the issue becomes more pertinent if one is actively seeking support for various personal situations and the people from whom one is seeking support are drawing lines and boundaries to limit the number of people who can seek or offer support. (I suspect that the poorly delimited “boundaries” of transgendered and hetero- or homosexual “communities” had a lot to do with prompting the OP. I still do not see a debate, here. Of course, we could all sit around and “debate” the various unsupported stereotypes that some posters have bandied about, but that does not seem too productive to me.)
Oh, no, that’s soooo last century… :rolleyes:
For some reason, this whole discussion about what it means to be a lesbian recalls to mind the image of the South Park kids chewing carpet.
The idea that you don’t need to have a particular political ideology to be a lesbian (or a queer of any particular variety) is relevant, but like it or not queer identity is complex and lesbian identity moreso (after all, the Lesbian in College phenomenon doesn’t have a parallel with gay boys.) Frankly I don’t have much of a stomach for the postmodernist bent of queer theory, but I’ve seen the complexity of “lesbianism” in a lot of different ways. My mother divorced my father and was a lesbian for a number of years, with a lot of the stereotypical trappings that go with it: commited feminist, pagan, and so on. Now as far as I can tell she’s completely dropped her lesbian identity and she’s certainly only dating men. I can’t claim to understand this, as my own sexuality is pretty solid and I don’t see myself ever deciding to switch teams. Maybe a lot of these people could be more accurately described as “bisexual”, but I think that’s oversimplistic as well: our own culture’s paradigm of sexual attraction is not reflected in many other societies. In my mother’s case, I think her self-identification as a lesbian was more a political one than anything else, though she certainly had long-term relationships with women.
There is a lot of politicking attached to being queer in our society, and the concept of betraying your community by having the wrong politics is alive and well in all parts of the queer community. (But then, hell, I sure as fuck wouldn’t date a Republican. The concept of being gay and politically aligning yourself with a lot of people who really don’t like you is a disturbing one for me.)
Anyway, I don’t have any answers here, but I think you’re missing a lot of the social realities of the situation if you use reductionist terms about who a person’s sexually attracted to when sexual attraction exists within the bounds of a culture and seems to be to a great extent malleable by that culture. Add in the various lesbian subidentities - the often-times narrow categorization of “butch” and “femme”, and weird sexual identities like “stone butch” - this stuff is not simple, and it’s missing a lot to look at it as a simple combination of sex organs.
You know the old saying - a woman without a man is like a fish without a bisexual.
Roy Cohn was not a poster boy for Judaism or homosexuality. The fact remains that he was both gay and Jewish.
A lesbian who is not accepted by her peers is still a lesbian. Regardless of further subclassifications (butch, femme, etc) she’s still a lesbian. Regardless of how she’s treated by society in general, she’s still a lesbian.
Show me where I even once defined sex by genitals.
Queer theory may be a useful tool to use for interpreting a text or for generating testable social science hypotheses. Fine. Rational choice theory or poststructural theory can do the same things. Theory is handy to describe human behavior in aggregate.
Should it really govern how individuals order their lives or manage relationships with other people? Should the internalization of theory be an admission requirement to join a particular cultural group? I hope not.
Perhaps the skepticism that Johanna faces is unrelated to her bona fides as a lesbian. I might be more concerned that in her efforts to walk, talk, and read books like a lesbian should, she might be reifying the theory at the expense of the actual living, breathing lesbians around her. If she is so consumed with constructing her own identity, how much does she really have left to give back to the group?
To put it bluntly, Johanna, is there a chance that your concern about your acceptance is related to your being more Catholic than the Pope? You seem to be very concerned about the form of your lesbian identity, but to me eye, this is at the expense of content.
I can read Sappho in Greek, too: what is so remarkable about her voice (among other things) is that she is so unencumbered by these kinds of pedantic concerns despite living in a world demonstrably hostile to all things female. Quoting her to prove your bona fides obviously misses the point. Perhaps putting down the theory, putting aside your intense concern for your self-constructed identity, and trying to befriend the people in your circle for their own sakes rather than to gain admission into their club would be a helpful start. Living, loving, and losing like a lesbian might also help.
The debate? For the reasons above enumerated, theory is a worthless and harmful guide to ordering one’s personal life.
You know, I just spent way too long reading the other thread, not to mention being in this thread, and I still don’t know what the OPs debate topic was meant to be.
The debate topic is: There is a hijack going on in the thread I (the OP) just linked to. Since the hijack is GD material, let’s start a new thread, rather than polute the old one.
I can well underestand the idea.