The essay genre, ‘I’m a straight lady but not a Straight Lady’, is going nowhere. A recent installment involves its author self-flagellating over remaining queer-identified despite being a run of the mill cis lady married to a cis dude. (The “cis” is not traditionally mentioned re: the dude. It is implied.) Said author was still called out for thinking herself interesting by Julie Bindel, whose views on such ladies are known.
What do we do with this? Is there any point to saying that a straight-passing, straight-privileged, straight-paired, what-have-you woman IS a heterosexual, when she very well might not be? No. But does it matter if such a woman, in her past (or, all the more so, in her mind), has a glimmer of attraction to a woman, a smidge of identification with non-womanness herself? If so, how?
It is plainly irritating when women with husbands and bourgeois lifestyles generally identify, sometimes in an unspecified way, with queerness. Irritating not just to honest-to-goodness lesbians like Bindel (though not to all lesbians; others see the phenomenon as a sign of an accepting society) but also to certain heterosexual women who have made peace with their own boringness. Who do you think you are, [redacted], when you’re no gayer than I am?
But I cannot blame my fellow straight/effectively-straight ladies for this, the latest fashionable manifestation of fauxbivalence. When female heterosexuality is understood not as the desire to have sex and relationships with men (with all the myriad scenarios and arrangements that encompasses…), but as a kind of unselfaware non-sexuality (not asexuality, which is self-aware and identity-containing). An anti-feminism. Not even trad so much as out of the loop. Who would want in on that?
But unfortunately the only ways of articulating that you’re a human being with an inner life involve implying that others of your apparent kind are not. As in you’re not one of those straight ladies, but the others absolutely are.
when single, such women have the additional option of announcing “no cis straight white men” on their dating profiles (however, in my cis straight white male experience, this rule is not always observed to the letter)
"But unfortunately the only ways of articulating that you’re a human being with an inner life"
We are still stuck on Project Proving Women Are Fully Human it would seem. Btw, your linked piece is phenomenal. I would add that some of this also seems to be women not wanting to be like their mothers and what could be more different from the previous generation than disavowing straightness.
The irony of this is, that while being a mother seems low status (soccer mom, wine mom, mombie, only praiseworthy if a MILF), in progressive circles, women are expected to act like mothers. Caring for everyone, not asserting any individual needs, hence the common cry that feminism should be for everyone, to help everyone (but with women doing all the work). In It's a Sin, the Jill character who acted as a surrogate mother and had no personal life or loves of her own was wildly praised with the #BeMoreJill as women lined up to say that they too wished they were just like her.