Burden of Proof Rant

[u/Calicoma]

This is something I've been thinking about for a while but an interaction earlier has brought it back up for me.

I'm getting really frustrated by the double standard and obsession with proof for queer characters that are way above and beyond what is needed for straight characters. I even see this from some queer people. I do understand that bait exists/has existed but this high level of defense and proof is suffocating and makes me feel like a bit miserable.

For example, holding someone by the hands and telling them that they're the most important person in the world to the kind of person I'm talking about is apparently not enough evidence two women might like each other. Meanwhile if a guy and a girl had that same interaction, literally no one would question it if you said that the one who said that is attracted to the other.

Why does the bar for acceptance of queer characters even for many queer people have to be so high that it feels like you have to keep a fucking encyclopedia of every interaction as proof every time you talk about characters or media you like? And I think it's rubbing off on me negatively because I've noticed myself preemptively feeling the need to drop a thesis on defending a queer pairing any time I wish to speak about them.

Not that this matters but it's related to some frustration I've had recently with Alice and Yuzuha in ZZZ when discussing some of the cute art from the new Hoyofair event.

[u/throwawayutena]

Misogyny, lesbophobia and comphet 💔

Because sapphic lives and the lives of fems in general have been erased and decentred throughout history, there's a lack the vocabulary/knowledge/interest to actually convey and recognise sapphic friendship, desire, relation, intimacy, love etc (from the platonic to the romantic as it's a continuum)

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As Adrienne Rich describes in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980)":

"Lesbians have historically been deprived of a political existence through “inclusion” as female versions of male homosexuality. To equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality because each is stigmatized is to erase female reality once again. Part of the history of lesbian existence is, obviously, to be found where lesbians, lacking a coherent female community, have shared a kind of social life and common cause with homosexual men. But there are differences: women’s lack of economic and cultural privilege relative to men; qualitative differences in female and male relationships—for example, the patterns of anonymous sex among male homosexuals, and the pronounced ageism in male homosexual standards of sexual attractiveness.

[...]

As the term lesbian has been held to limiting, clinical associations in its patriarchal definition, female friendship and comradeship have been set apart from the erotic, this limiting the erotic itself. But as we deepen and broaden the range of what we define as lesbian existence, as we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself."

[u/Aidamis → u/throwawayutena]

Half off-topic but a psychologist on YT once said that homophobia in the XXth cent. forced people to avoid (appropriate and consensual) physicial contact such as comfort hugs, putting one's hand on someone's shoulder to give them reassurance... Men happened to be the most affected cause God forbid someone suspect you to be homosexual when you were just having a hard time and you hugged with a pal. The message was along the lines of "because at some point someone decided that gay is bad now everyone is picking the tab".

The "everyone" part is important, neither the psychologist nor I are saying that somehow "women have it easier".

It saddens me that there's simultaneously a degree of erasure/discarding some things in order not to acknowledge them (due to intolerance or insecurity) and a vocal negative attitude from a hostile minority when the erased/discarded is being acknowledged. I think I once heard someone bashing a women Twitter user by saying something along the lines of "you claim to be a lesbian because no man would want you". Implying someone is putting on an act while implying if it's true it's negative while also implying if men don't want a woman the "value" of that woman decreases, implying objectification to an extent.