Men Are Terrible at Guessing Women's Sexual Orientation
They only see two options and don't realize how sexist that is
If there is one thing I can count on in this world, it’s that heterosexual men will almost always mislabel my sexuality. At one time, I even named it in my bio just to help people better understand what they’d find in my writing so they could skip it if my worldview and identity were offensive to them.
And yet still, heterosexual men could not get it right.
There’s only two possibilities when they bring an argument to the table. Many assume I’m a lesbian, simply because I’m a feminist.
This, of course, is one of the laziest forms of misogyny. To many men, particularly patriarchal men, lesbian is not so much a sexuality but more a political statement. In other words, they see lesbian as a synonym of feminist, which in turn, is a synonym of misandrist. There’s no actual consideration of my sexual orientation - it’s just an attempt to discredit me.
But believe it or not, it’s the second option that annoys me the most. It drives me absolutely crazy when men assume I’m heterosexual.
Sure, I find men’s propensity to call every feminist they encounter a lesbian incredibly boring and unoriginal (get some new materials, guys), but nothing could be more boring to me than the sweeping assumptions men make that they are the only thing that could turn me on.
“Female breasts send men into a tizzy,” a man recently said in my comment section. “This is the way we’re biologically programmed. You are wrong that they aren’t sexy. As a woman, you couldn’t possibly understand.”
I get comments of this sort a lot - particularly when I write about the hyper-sexualization of breasts.
Honestly, it’s almost funny to me how mad some men get in response to this subject. It’s as if they’re afraid I’m threatening to take their favorite fetish away. One male reader accused me of trying to erase male sexuality by insisting breasts aren’t inherently sexual.
Which is what I said, by the way - that breasts aren’t inherently sexual. I never said they weren’t sexy, despite the sheer amount of men who argue that I did. (It’s easy to fact check, guys.)
As a woman, it’s important to me to call out the fetishization of the female body and the fact that hyper-sexualizing breasts to the point where we conflate them with penises and vulvae is just a clever tactic of the patriarchy to exert control over the female body.
