Back in high school, a teacher pulled me aside to ask me if I was gay.
It was English class. We’d been asked to write paragraphs about our ideal crush. She probably thought she was cleverly engaging us to get us to use adjectives. I said I liked men’s legs, particularly a well-turned calf.
She asked if I would speak with her in the hallway outside the classroom. I wondered if, once again, I’d said a bad word without realizing it. Bending close to whisper, she asked, “Marie, are you a lesbian?”
“Um… no. Wait – why?”
“You said you like men’s legs.”
“I do.”
“No, Marie,” I remember her saying, carefully, like this was a rule of grammar, “you like butts. Women like men’s butts, not their legs.”
A girl perving on men’s body parts did not sound straight to her. Let that sink in.
And in case you missed it: I’m straight. I’m almost, like, TOO straight. The first time I watched porn with my boyfriend and a second woman appeared on screen? I literally ran from the room and shouted “Tell me when she’s gone.”
And, oh! How many times I’ve had men tell me that I must find naked women attractive because it is a truth universally accepted that women are more beautiful than men.
Actually I imagined it in fishnets but I don’t draw well enough to convey masculinity in heels. Still… hubba hubba!
Yeah, no. Give me David over Venus, any day of the week. I would in fact be happy if every last scantily-clad woman in modern advertising, every marble woman holding up a stair rail and every single last leg lamp were replaced with male versions. This is my fantasy and…
…and I just imagined it and guuuuh the leg lamp in “A Christmas Story” finally makes sense. (Seriously, I just realized by inserting a male leg that the lamp might have been seen as sexy as well as ugly. Just now. I’m stopping to draw a man leg lamp.)
… I digress…
I’m a cis-gendered heterosexual white woman. Sexuality is on easy mode for me! If anyone could escape the constant push back against non-conforming behavior you’d think it would be, well, the conformers.
I’ve had to explain to people that I like sexy men.
I LIKE SEXY MEN. Why is that so odd to say?
“No, Marie,” friends have said, “You don’t. We women don’t care what men look like, we’re only interested in their personality.”
“Um… I’m not surfing the internet for pictures of interesting guys.”
“Well, of course not. You don’t like pornography. You’re a woman and we aren’t stimulated visually. We want to engage with a man’s mind, not his body.”
“My browser history says differently, by a lot. Wanna see this video of ‘Totally Straight College Guys’?”
“Ew, no! Well… um… send me the link for later.”
(Take that, straw woman!)
Seriously… this is some gaslighty stuff, right? “You don’t like what you like – you like what I’m telling you you like.” Some of it is just the natural inclination to be confused when people don’t share your tastes, but a lot of it is a willful blindness to nonconformity. This idea that our sexual selves in particular have to be almost painfully predictable. Is it fear? We want this big, messy part of our lives to have strict rules so we can pretend we understand it?
I dunno. It’s not just me, right? Have you ever been told you don’t like what you like?
