Griping about heteronormativity, gender normativity, you know, the usual

lierdumoa:

I always get sort of vaguely annoyed when people start talking about how a male actor has “leveled up” in the attractiveness department now that he’s put on 40 lbs of muscle for some role, as if beefy dudes are objectively more desirable than slim dudes.

Like that’s just your personal taste. It’s not a universal metric.

I feel like it’s this heteronormative and cis-normative thing equating muscular development with male maturity/masculinity/dominance/superiority.

You’re essentially implying that less muscular men are “leveled down” – underdeveloped, boyish, effeminate, etc.

And that in turn implies that any woman not attracted to super beefy dudes is either a “lesbian in denial” or an ephebophile.

And, like, as a bi/pansexual gender questioning person … ugh, this is hard to put into words.

But basically one aspect of biphobia that bisexuals deal with a lot is being told we have access to “straight privilege.” And one of the straight privileges we supposedly have access to is the ability to relate to hetero romances as they are portrayed in the media, in a way that lesbians cannot.

And I don’t know how to explain that the heteronormative paradigm for different sex relationships that’s presented in the media is just as alienating to me as it is to lesbians.

That I don’t just find mainstream het romances un-relatable, but I in fact find most of them actively repellant?

And I recognize that I don’t speak for all bisexuals, and my attraction to androgyny and gender fluidity is my own personal taste.

I just feel like society keeps bombarding me with the message that being a mature woman means being attracted to “real men”, where maleness and male maturity are both defined through toxic masculinity. And I feel like that in turn helps perpetuate the idea that bisexuality is a mark of immaturity – a phase straight women go through in their youth.

Like I read this infuriating article a while back where film critic David Rooney, in a review of last year’s lesbian romance Carol, states, “I spent much of Carol asking, “Why would anyone leave Kyle Chandler?” [source]

And like, of course he finds it inexplicable. I’m not surprised any man would find it inexplicable. Kyle Chandler, who plays the role of Harge, is after all what society tells us women are supposed to want. Society and the media devote a lot of resources to reassuring men like Harge that all lesbians are secretly bisexual, and that all bisexual women are secretly immature straight girls going through an experimental phase they’ll eventually out-grow.

Gender fluidity, particularly in AFAB individuals, is similarly pathologized. The media loves the story of the “tomboy” who grows up and transforms into a hyperfeminine, sexually objectifiable “bombshell,” which essentially conflates gender non-conformity in AFAB individuals with youth and immaturity.

(Gender non-conformity in AMAB individuals, in contrast, is more typically conflated with sexual predation/perversion, duplicity, mental illness, sociopathy and DID in particular, etc. – at least according to my personal informal observations)

Huh.

You know now that I think about it, that’s a discussion that really needs to happen.

We should be talking more about the transphobic underpinnings of the “hot girl who used to be a tomboy” trope.

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Anyway this post kind of went all over the place. I might to re-address these issues more cogently later. Just spitballing, for now.