Monosexist Aggressions: Denying Someone's Self-Description

In this blog post, I’m responding to something some people I don’t know said at a party. It’s a specific incident, but echoes many others I’ve seen over the years. I haven’t gotten the hang of confronting monosexism when I hear it, so I’m blogging instead. This is a relatively subtle form of monosexism for some people to recognize for what it is, so I think a post on it might help.

Last night, some guys were talking about a guy who’d had sex with one or more of them (hard to tell, since this guy was apparently representative of many guys who do the same thing), and afterward said, “You know, I could totally see myself settling down with a woman and having kids,” before going back to his highly heterosexist church.

Now, what this guy said was awful and the guy he said it to totally has the right to complain about it. Some reasons it’s awful:

1. The culture/church/possibly parents or other important people who made this guy internalize homophobia and dream of a heteronormative existence, thus devaluing his own reality

2. This guy for spewing his own internalized homophobia back at someone who trusted him enough to have sex with him, right after the height of intimacy

3. The conflation of a normative lifestyle (married with kids) and a normative sexuality (with a woman)

But the conversation at the party hinged on another supposed awful thing: That this guy was in denial about being gay due to internalized homophobia. That’s what people seemed to be saying they were frustrated/disgusted with.

Now, I don’t know what this guy identifies as, and since he stands in for many guys they presumably run the gamut of orientation labels. But I don’t need to know his label since the assumption that “just had sex with a guy” and “might one day have a relationship with a woman” is by itself monosexist/biphobic, denying the possibility of orientations other than straight and gay (and also equating behavior with orientation).

Someone else at the party brought this up, “Maybe he’s bi.”

“No, he’s never interested in women. He’s only interested in men.”

“Maybe that’s just because he was suppressed before and is now exploring this side of himself.”

“No,” repeat the same reasons.

The truth is, they don’t know whether this guy is or has ever been attracted to women. Maybe he’s sexually fluid, and goes through phases of being or not being attracted to women. Maybe he’s demisexual for women and needs to already be in a strong emotional relationship with a woman to be sexually attracted to her, whereas he’s instantly sexually attracted to men. Maybe he’s attracted to 10 times as many men as women--that doesn’t mean he isn’t attracted to women. Or maybe he isn’t attracted to women and will one day decide to identify as gay (or maybe he isn’t attracted to women and will never decide to identify as gay).

They should respect what he says about himself. His sexual identity is his, not theirs, and it’s up to him, not them, to define it. Bisexual men exist. Straight men who have sex with men exist. It’s wrong to wipe out their existence just because gay men who used to identify as bi, but now think they were wrong or were lying at the time, also exist.

Some monosexuals seem to think they have the right to undermine bisexuals. After all, straight people are better than queers, right? Or else gay people are the “real” queers and the “real” sufferers of heterosexism and the “real” organizers of the movement, right?

There were nonmonosexuals at Stonewall, nonmonosexuals who started major pride parades, nonmonosexuals who orchestrated the fight against AIDS. We own the movement as much as monosexual queers do. And, statistically, bisexuals worse off in terms of poverty, health, rape, and intimate partner abuse. Like, often TWICE as bad as heterosexuals and/or gays and lesbians.

Another thing bisexuals suffer from more than monosexuals? Teen pregnancy. You know a really major reason bisexual teens engage in more risky sexual behaviors? They feel like they have to prove their sexual orientations, because they hear people around them questioning others who don’t identify as gay or straight.*

I felt that way too. It was a major source of teenage angst. I didn’t take care of my emotional safety in my first few sexual relationships, and yes, I have PTSD and had it before I dated the guy who outright raped me.

I’m not saying that the needs of bisexuals should supercede the needs of monosexuals, within or outside of gender and sexual minority communities. I am saying that monosexual privilege is a thing, gay or straight, and that gossiping about how someone isn’t really the sexual orientation they identify is, or doesn’t really have attractions they claim to, is real oppression that really hurts people. You wouldn’t want to be told that you’re gay because someone of the opposite sex abused you; don’t tell the world that non-monosexuals’ identities are up for debate because churches/culture/family abused them.

*I’ve also heard and read accounts by asexuals who engaged in unwanted sexual behavior to try to prove themselves, either as asexual--by proving they didn’t like it--or as sexual, because they didn’t know there was another option or were afraid to take it--not trying to exclude asexuals here, just don’t have any studies of them at hand.

Some references:

http://sf-hrc.org/sites/sf-hrc.org/files/migrated/FileCenter/Documents/HRC_Publications/Articles/Bisexual_Invisiblity_Impacts_and_Recommendations_March_2011.pdf

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_factsheet_lbg-a.pdf

http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Food-Insecurity-in-LGBT-Communities.pdf

Techniques for Disabling Students: Assign Homework During Class

Consider the social model of disability. Consider homework assignments.

When I was maybe 18 - 19, I participated in a NAMI program called "Parents and Teachers as Allies." As part of a panel including a parent and an educator, I got to tell my story of growing up with mental illness to a room full of teachers, and try to impress on them things like "Please send a kid to the nurse/counselor if they're nearly starving to death one semester." The main educational point I stressed? "Never just verbally give or alter a homework session!"

This stuff should be written prominently and reliably in the same place on the board every day. Much better, it should be available online. And even better, to really stop disadvantaged kids from falling through the cracks? Move to a flipped classroom.

In a flipped classroom, the only work assigned for "home" are short video lectures. Instead of giving lectures in class, the students do activities (including traditional homework-style exercises) and the teacher works individually with students who are having trouble, on the things they're having trouble with. (They can email that or post on a discussion forum.) Kids find it easier to watch videos at home, so some who didn't do homework (I was definitely one of them) start watching the videos. The ones who don't? Well, it's a lot better to miss a video but do the activities and get help one-on-one than it is to watch a lecture in class, probably not absorbing much of it, go home to an environment where there is no help, and never do the exercises (I'm paraphrasing something I read in a NYT article in this sentence).

This is the most exciting (on a personal level) educational innovation I have ever heard of. YEARS of my life were spent feeling worthless and behaving accordingly because I couldn't do homework and supposedly that was about "work ethic" and therefore I would not be able to support myself as an adult and would either die on the streets or be a burden to whatever relative had to grudgingly support me.

(Why couldn't I do homework? Academic anxiety, poor executive function, lack of self-efficacy, lack of parental help, depression, an inability to follow what was going on in the classroom and therefore hear these assignments, losing track of what was do when, internet/media addiction--I felt like I was drowning and like even basic control over what I did when I got home from school slipped away from me every time I tried grasping for it.)

To get back to the point of this article: If you give homework assignments by speaking, you are disabling students with attention or auditory processing problems. (Attention doesn't mean ADHD: It can be anything from hunger to depression to worries about an unstable home life.) If you write homework down only in the classroom, you're disabling students who will have a hard time remembering to write it down and then not losing the paper you wrote it on. If you assign homework online (and all your students have internet access at home or stay after school to do homework), you're re-enabling a huge group of students but still disabling those who lack the executive function, self-confidence, stable home-life, and/or parental support to do the homework. Flipping your classroom re-enables a huge group of students to learn, and I would recommend it. But at least post your assignments online.