Dyke disappointment, men, and do women secretly love jerks?

Is it what we say or what we do that is the truth?

I feel like we lost one from the tribe last night.  Of course, you can never be quite sure when they tread the line and don’t quite come out.  But I thought she was “safe”.  Singing so many great girl anthems, singing about kissing girls, about being queer, she was surely one of us.

But my favourite pop singer, the woman who litters every playlist I have, and to whose music I have ugly cried, in person, in concert, in the bloody front row, just got engaged.  To a man!

I’m gonna say it.  That’s pretty bad.  But what made it worse was the gushing, princess and prince charming fantasy, the elaborate proposal and her shrieking scream of ‘yes’.  And I thought, what’s the matter with me?  Why can’t I just be happy for her?

Is there a place for the fairytale narrative in a world of true equality, of a world where feminism brings sexual power into balance?

This singer represented an anthem for the oppressed.  In me.  I cried to her music so much because her voice, her lyrics, saw deep inside me to a place of anger, frustration, hurt, pain.  And that was made possible by the Queer narrative.  But when the photos of the engagement party were posted, it was just too white, too perfect, and too fairtytale.

Is there something the matter with me?

It makes me wonder whether the angry feminist words were just great marketing. Isn’t that appropriation?  When I look at the makeup of the audience at her concerts, it feels like the audience is majority queer, or at least exploring.  How will they feel?  Will they feel the same way, betrayed?

When someone sings for you, there has to be a shared inside looking out, not a kind of outside looking in.

I am happy for her to have finally found what she is looking for: a man.  But I am sad that for me her music has lost its legitimacy.

When I was in high school, in the agonizing grip of male puberty, and flirting with every waking breath with the beautiful girls in my sister school, I found myself blunted into the friend zone.  Pretty much always, until I ended up dating one of the prettiest girls in school. From nothing to everything. And of course everyone knows what that is like in the tense and awkward environment of High School and puberty.

The delicious feeling of conquest, of having a pressure to “have a girlfriend” relieved, was all social, but still felt good. I ended up “losing” her over Spring Break one year to a jerk of a guy. One who later, in adult life, became a stalker and the subject of more than one restraining order for his predatory behaviour. I didn’t understand even then why what was so visible to me as a manifestation of toxic masculinity was not so visible to her, or that she chose to ignore it, or that it was a kind of flirting with danger…

The conversations that we had in the group of girls and their admirers in those fleeting after-school moments.  Or rather, I should say, the girls had, with me listening in, hanging onto the edge of the group.  It was always about boys.  About what jerks they were, what assholes.  The horrible things they did.  As an “insider” in the boys camp, I understood that the things the girls were discussing were just cake icing compared to what really gets discussed, what boys really think of girls, what they really do.  I knew that boys were actually worse than what they described.

In a nod to the politically relevant and current state of the US political landscape, constructed on top of the female social body, a widely known common good, one of the “girls” in that group, and one who I was rather fond of, later came out as one of the victims of a certain Supreme Court justice who was accused of repeated bouts of sexual assault as a teen. OMG, I have dated me!

I didn’t rat my male classmates out.  Not sure it would have made me look better to the girls anyway. That narrative, “oh, he’s just a jerk is so ‘pick me’. Ugh.”  Shoot the messenger?  Maybe.  But the toxic dissonance between stated desired behaviour, discussed deviations, and the insider’s truth was sickening to me.  I couldn’t understand why any of the girls, young women, in those conversations, still wanted boyfriends.  It didn’t add up.

It often seemed that the asshole guys were the ones most sought after.  I couldn’t understand that either.  My mother, bless her, in trying to help me understand it, made things more confusing.

It appeared that women were hypocrites.  That many of them actually wanted to be mistreated.  I couldn’t tell, and often still can’t, whether this was a response to social pressure, or was something deeper.  I don’t know if I will ever know, and I am not sure I would like to find out.

I consider myself a dyke because my wife is divorcing me because of it. Well, I consider myself that anyway, but hers is a profoundly positive affirmation in the negative. The best kind.  Those are her words.  

“I’m not a dyke.  I don’t want to have a lesbian relationship with you,” she said.  Poor thing.  And as I have found acceptance in the dyke community, I have found real joy, for I have found women who don’t like assholes.  They may have other quirks, but the male asshole is not on the list.  What a relief.

One hears a lot about how the lesbian community is unwelcoming to bi-sexuals, to trans women.  What I see?  Total welcome.  They are my sisters.  And they have been welcoming to me.

The idea that a woman might be waiting, singing about feminism, singing about queer women, about being different, all the while just waiting to hit the cis-hetero-normative jackpot just smacks of those high school girls. And I can’t help but describe them as confused, possibly self-harming. But is there any wonder? What horrible social pressures are put on women? And as the more prone to placate, more prone to people please, is it any wonder that they/we might think and act at times in ways that might be counter to their/our interests?

Don’t you know what you want?  Can’t you be honest to yourself?  Do we believe that everything is inside of us?  How can we if we are all sitting around waiting for a partner?  How can we if we are waiting for a partner who ticks all the boxes of privilege?

It just feels wrong.  It might seem strange to say it, but I think queer people know themselves and what they want better than straight people do.  And us trans girls?  Not a shred of doubt.

Or is there something bigger at play? Do we teach women in society that in order to have love, to have security, we have to give up agency? Of course it isn’t zero sum, but is that what many believe?