butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:
not to be a bitter asshole but the overwhelming “my gf is perfect and relationships between women are are all pure and perfect” culture on here is annoying. there are a lot of us out here being used, cheated on, dumped, abused, having communication issues and shitty breakups, and lesbian culture is not a binary of “im alone and pining after an imaginary perfect gf” or “i have a perfect gf”. it does baby lesbians and bi women a disservice. don’t feel like there’s something wrong with you if you have bad dates or weird dates or women treat you like shit or trespass your boundaries and in general don’t act like perfect magical moon princesses and your relationship isn’t a magical dream of cat ownership and cuddling. women are people too, and that means women are flawed too. there are wonderful women out there and you will find one someday to build your life with but there are a lot of assholes out there too, you’re not failing at anything if you date one of them. and you have the capability of being a shitty asshole too!
Boy there’s a lot of defensive creeps on this post!
“I’m a lesbian in a perfect relationship and I would never downplay that so that other lesbians aren’t jealous that’s ridiculous“
jesus, yeah this is definitely about jealousy not lesbians and bi women in toxic or straight up abusive relationships feeling isolated and wanting to change that!
A key reason why some believe LGBTQ IPV to be rare may be due to an assumption that LGBTQ people are inherently nonviolent. This may be particularly the case for sexual minority women. In contrast to the aggression often associated with culturally prominent masculinity norms, many lesbian women are socialized to perceive relationships involving two women as a peaceful and ideal “lesbian utopia.” Unfortunately, this powerful stereotype can impede lesbian female victims’ ability to recognize that a partner’s behavior is in fact abusive rather than normal.26 For example, in reflecting on her same-gender IPV victimization back in the 1990s, Julie describes the ubiquity of the lesbian utopia ideal in the United Kingdom that prevented her from discussing the abuse with anyone: “Well it was during a period where everyone was just raving about erm how brilliant woman-to-woman relationships were and also I don’t think anyone believed that one woman could do that to another woman—there was just no, no sense of reality around that at all. There was sort of a political euphoria about lesbianism at the time; well not even lesbianism, just woman-to-woman relationships.”27 Echoing these sentiments, a victim of female same-gender IPV in the United States explains the powerful influence the lesbian utopia ideal had on her ability to recognize the abuse: “No—I thought, well, I just thought that it was fine because we were girls, like, and girls don’t hurt each other like that. So I just thought that it was the way it was supposed to be.”28
– LGBTQ Intimate Partner Violence: Lessons for Policy, Practice, and Research by Adam M. Messinger
An example of what can happen when a group of people are glorified
This is exactly how I got into an emotionally abusive relationship. My other bi friends had told me “relationships with women are better because there aren’t power dynamics like there are between women and men.”
I doublethought (doublethunk?) my way back to “this isn’t a power dynamic” every time I felt demeaned and afraid, because “there are no power dynamics between women,” so I couldn’t have been living one.
Lesbianism-as-purity stuff terrifies me now, y’all.
I’ve spoken about this before. One of the advantages of hands-on, community-building LGBTQIAP+ activism is that I had the opportunity to talk directly to hundreds of people and counsel them on a whole variety of concrete issues. By far the thorniest problem I was faced with was intimate partner violence within relationships between women. Many abused women came to me in emotionally fragile states, yet adamantly refused to do anything more than talk with me in confidence – such as speak to one of our official counselors or to a support group, never bloody mind even the idea of filing any kind of charges against their girlfriends!
Within the community, they were taught the idea that same-gender relationships between women were not only inherently ‘better’ and had ‘less capacity for containing abuse’ than other kinds of relationships (particularly straight ones), but that ‘airing their dirty laundry in public’ (talking publicly about their abuse) would be a damaging act toward the LGBTQIAP+ community as a whole, as it would give homophobes more dirt to fling in our direction. Given my disgust toward everything related toward purity politics and respectability politics, you can imagine what my stance toward the above is – I value truth, transparency and not throwing domestic abuse survivors under the fucking bus a hell of a lot more than I value us presenting a sanitized, artificially clean image to the world, when we should all know by now that our most irrational detractors would continue to hate us even if we were the human incarnations of purity! There’s a subset of people you just cannot win over and I’d rather have them crow like broken records about the problems within the community, rather than glossing over said problems and doing a hell of a lot of damage to young queer people in the process!
Before anyone starts screaming – the takeaway people should be taking from this isn’t ‘so now I can’t talk about my perfect WLW relationship?’ or ‘you people want to trash the image of lesbians!’ or other barmy shit like that. No, the message is ‘same-sex relationships between women fall on a scale that’s much more complex than ‘shades of soft, pastel-pink’, the way Tumblr all too often presents them.’ Queer women are people. Queer women are humans and as such, we’re as fallible and mistake-prone as anyone else on this Earth, no matter how much we might pretend that we’re some sort of ‘evolved form of person.’ We’re not exempt from perpetuating toxic, abusive models within our relationships and trying to ignore that does us all an enormous disservice.
Okay. Okay. I reblogged this post already when no one was quoting the bullshit responses to it.
But as someone who personally protected my abusers for 20 years because of the fear that their abuse would be blamed on their sexuality and so my own sexuality would become both the reason I was abused and proof I was abusive myself, I saw red.
Do you know how many women I saw growing up desperately trying to deal with the fact that a small community meant they couldn’t escape their abusers, but it was impossible to go to the cops or anyone else because the whole community would turn on them saying “you’re just giving them more evidence we’re evil!”
Abuse in our community is massively underreported and is fucking deadly because of how vulnerable so many of us are due to prior abuse. It is ~critical~ that we acknowledge this in ways that are actually beneficial to the people being abused.
Being a bi/pan woman who just dragged myself out of a ‘getting really toxic and emotionally manipulative’ relationship with a woman, all of the lesbian purity posts on queer Tumblr feel like stingy little knives of microaggression.
Reblogging this because human relationships are goddamn complicated. Queer women aren’t all magical moon goddesses or evil succubi. We are human, and capable of all of the entire range of human beauty and cruelty.
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