Apparently
Apparently Magic Mike is a good reason to review the rules.
Dear Straight Girls: You are not gay men. Please don't presume to speak for us.
Oh, have you once entertained Bisexual Thoughts? Yeah, sorry, no matter how many seconds or years you've been a lesbian, you're still not a gay man. Which is the specific thing you're appropriating.
You know what you can do, though? Speak for yourself. I realize you've been socialized to consider that an alien concept, but appropriating my life as your fun vacation in somebody else's oppression doesn't actually help either of us. You have plenty to do on your side of the farm before you start telling me how to feel about mine.
Sorry to rain on your parade -- through my rainy-day lack of civil rights, and your fun experiment in being oppressed -- but that's how privilege works. And yes, screaming about that just makes you look like more of an asshole, which is also how privilege works.
Thanks.
Update 1: The thing is, I get that a woman's sexuality -- a person's sexuality -- is a moving target. There is not a person I love that hasn't fought this fight, and I mean that literally. I don't have a family member or a friend that hasn't come into this conversation. What that means to me is, You fight your fights and don't fight your not-fights.
If there was a reason for me to claim bisexuality, I too could write down the dates and times I wasn't exactly gay. There's not, because bisexuality, especially among women, especially provisionally, claims privilege.
What does it for me is this idea that being more victimized or more outraged equals more of a voice. If you feel that way, you're operating from the privilege of that option. You wouldn't be reading this if you misread or misunderstood my values that much. Powerlessness feels like powerlessness all the time. I am gay all the time. You are a woman all the time. Not just when it's politically or morally expedient.
If you play the political card, you have changed the conversation into being about bona fides, rather than your actual identity, and at that point you have already lost whatever fight you think you're fighting.
2 comments:
I think I'm not good enough at pop cultures to figure out the Channing Tatum angle here.
I understand this post from the angle of owning and inhabiting your own shit instead of someone else's. And I'm going to assume-- based solely on my own biased interpretations of things I've read from you in the past-- that you're encouraging a position of female strength instead strength/victimization by proxy. Granted, it reads a little like "back off my victimhood and find your own" but that's probably my 90s upbringing asserting itself.
I am generally grossed out by the possessiveness of oppressed groups over histories of oppression and their mutually perpetuating partners, the privileged oppressed who glom on to that baffling shine of identity perceived in oppression.
And that probably isn't a sentence.
"If feelings of political or social persecution persist, consult a doctor, or your own life as a straight woman with her own problems."
You're right, though. The actual Magic Mike angle just happens to be an ugly coincidence. Still, when it comes up, it's probably best to go back over the basics.
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