so yesterday i was driving around the vassar campus and i came upon this sight: a van (taking up both lanes of the road i might add) being driven by a girl leaning across the passenger side seat and basically out the window, talking to another girl walking her bike.  and the thought occurred to me that if this driver of the van was male i would have interpreted the scenario differently. and then it occurred to me that i was at vassar. and gender rules, roles and stereotypes just aren’t the same at vassar as they are everywhere else. so i started thinking.

a few weeks ago we watched this documentary in my women images class where this woman walked down a city street with a camera and filmed the guys hitting on her as she did it (as well as their reactions/ responses when she confronted them). at one point during the documentary a man responded that he hit on her because she “looked single”. she challenged him on that saying that it seems as if he’s suggesting that she need to be hanging off the arms of a man in order to be shielded from the male gaze, sexual harassment, and related. i think he tried to say that that wasn’t what he was implying, but… that’s exactly what he was implying. solo women appear single. and it doesn’t stop there. groups of women are all single as well.  and hetero.

in section after the lecture where we watched that documentary a few of the girls brought up dancing at clubs and how if a group of girl friends were together (with no guys) single guys thought it was their place to infiltrate and start dancing with them (or flat-out ON them) without their permission. they talked about the girl code of signaling that the friend should come in and get in between her friend and the guy to spare her friend the encounter. i vividly remember my brief encounters with this in 2008. my hair was short and i’m pretty sure i was read as a lesbian by most people, and yet i still had men on me, on my friends, all around us, and if we didn’t have a code there would have been a lot of unwanted scenarios. and i remember wondering what gave them that right.

the other day emma and i were watching the l word (the end of season one in particular) and jenny who had been coming into herself as a woman who is attracted to women was asked out by this guy (in a way that seemed pretty random to us as the viewers). emma paused the show to discuss how it’s not right or fair or whatever that a guy can go up to an unassuming female and strike up a conversation that will end in the proposal for a date. but if you’re gay (and she referenced the scene with dana trying to figure out if lara was gay) you have to jump through hoops first, not only to find out if they’re gay, but to just to find out if they’re going to get offended or not. we got into a conversation about how there isn’t equality in that way. the people who are the recipient of homosexual advances don’t always say “thanks but no thanks” in the way straight people do- no, sometimes there’s aggression (either physical or relational) involved that complicates things in a major way, and if it’s not present the fear of it still is. so you have a lot of single queers.

we talk a lot in therapy about what led to me at 20 getting into a relationship with a minor (at 16.75 yrs) and i’m going to say that i think a lot of this was at work. not even just within me and shaped by my personality and perceptions (and love) which i've talked about a million times before, but all this social stuff too. the truth is you DON’T have the freedom as a queer person to ask out the people you think are attractive, you don’t have the freedom to take a chance with desire the way you would if you were straight. you aren’t just limited to the (let’s be generous) 10% of the population who identify in a way that could make you two a match but you have to break your back (and heart) to figure out if the person you’re talking to isn’t of the heterosexual majority. and that’s no easy task. even understanding this, society won’t forgive me for responding to a love that literally fell into my lap during a time when i thought i would never find love? i think it’s absurd. and i think even they understand how absurd it is. but their hands are tied. like all of ours.

other related thoughts: the idea of “public vs private” is absurd. all that is private relates to all that is public, and all that is public relates to that which is private. marriage and family arrangements and sex and reproduction- these are all private matters which the government has its hands in. today in “women in early modern europe” we looked at how royal women influenced politics through their relationships with family members who had more political power. we looked at how women used religion (priests, confessors, nuns), piety (the idea that their first obligation is to all that is religious and couldn’t possibly have a political agenda) and illness (woe is me, bring me a priest that i may share my political troubles with…) to give themselves a voice. we basically discussed how women—thought to be inferior to men—used informal and indirect means to create political change. they used their PRIVATE relationships to influence PUBLIC matters. that was in the 1300s. i don’t think anything’s changed. i have faith that people are just as crafty now as they were then. in fact, i’m pretty sure this happens every day with the christian right.

another thing that hasn’t changed is women’s position in society. i just read a 200 page book (studying england, 1300-1600) where the author’s thesis was: women’s work stayed still in a changing economic world. within a traditionally female-dominated profession (brewing ale) technological advances were happening, things were becoming more specialized and professionalized, the rate of consumption was increasing, there was more demand… and as this happened woman began to get pushed out of the occupation. the more status the job incurred, the more capital was needed and the less women could afford to remain employed; guilds were formed that excluded women; it was taken over by capitalism and woman could no longer keep up.

i bring this book up for a few reasons: 1- it illustrates how patriarchy is not a plot, it’s just the maintenance of male power, 2- it illustrates the silencing of women in a systematic way, 3- it shows us again how law linked to the bible influences individual (private) lives, 4- it illustrates a segregation of the sexes which led to an eventual exclusion of women from a high-status job they once had direct access to. and this is important to me now because this is our history and this is all still true today where women do all the low-paid domestic labor and childcare and continue to live in poverty disproportionally to men.

i guess this was all just a really long tangent to say that i don’t think homosexuality is going to become an equally valid lifestyle to heterosexuality for a long long time. because it’s been 700 years since the 1300s and there’s still continuity in the area sex-segregation and religious beliefs and related, and for as long as that continuity remains, queer lives aren’t going to have a chance. i’m reading this book (you’ll hear that phrase a lot lately) and one of the author’s main points is that it isn’t gay SEX that gets society all freaked out, it’s gay LIFE and LIVING. it’s the idea that two men or two women (or a community of friends and lovers) could be complete outside the traditional heterosexual pairing. because it just screws up our timeline, our stereotypes and our misconceptions.

and i guess somewhere in here i’m back to where i started, with these thoughts and ideas about assumptions of heterosexuality and how solo people appear like single people and all that junk. i don’t really know what more to say about it, i don’t really know how to fight it, but i think it’s important to acknowledge its existence and that even we queer folk do it. 

i possibly have more to say on this subject but this is already quite long and all over the place and i think i should leave you here.