Quote Originally Posted by Shwenn View Post

Your sexuality is about whom you feel romantic love for.
....
I really dislike it when people reduce sexuality to fucking.
Hopefully I figured out how to use the quoting system right.

Let me start off by saying perhaps your sexuality is about whom you feel romantic love for. My sexuality is about who and how and when and why I want to fuck, thank you. Wrapped in with this is who I love, if I love, because often when I love someone I want to fuck them. But perhaps not, love and sex are strange things. I really dislike it when people tell me things, anything, about my sexuality, so we're even. As for the gay comment: if you really feel that all my posts (which I have been sheepish about, until now) are just here to make more reductionary statements then I can't help you. I brought up the question of gay men in the context of every other sexuality and why we don't question them; it was to make a point about why we think this is okay to do for bisexuals and not anyone else, not to reduce gay men to buttfucking. But, as an extension to that, I also really feel that the LGBT community has to self-sanitize a lot of things for wider consumption -- bear with me here, it's a tangent, of course -- because when people think of "homosexuals" what they see and what they hear is often reduced to just that, sex. To try and get some respectability we try not to talk about it, use safe rhetoric like "we're just normal people too, why are you so fascinated about what's happening in the bedroom?" This is true, but that doesn't mean buttsex doesn't happen, lol. The queer rights movement has moved into a trend of this sort of "we're just like you please don't hate us" defense, but I'd like more than tolerance on the basis that we live and love just as other humans do; it presupposes that I have to justify my humanity in the first place. And I'm just tired of having to act like sex doesn't happen in order to have my sexuality valued (this is talking about sexuality in terms of gaining acceptance in the greater world, but also apparently me and you). So that's the reason why I specifically talk about sex if I want to talk about sex, because I can and should. I didn't say anything against love, just for sex, so that's a distinction I make about whether my sexuality being about sex somehow demeans love (it doesn't, but if you choose to respect my sexuality only if I love someone, whaddaya gonna do).

All I wanted out of my original post was to put this discussion of sexuality in perspective with a broader one that is not as accepting as this online community, because the parallels made me uncomfortable, even though I knew no one was doing it on purpose. I would argue that the parallels of mistrust for "bisexuals"-in-quotation-marks is echoing and helping the kind of dubiousness and disingenuousness-filled rhetoric that surrounds the queer community in general (at least in America). And I think it is rooted in that same counter-productive and oppressive place, whether we realize it or not. That is no one's fault -- we're fed seemingly-innocent things like this all the time, like how referring to it as "gay marriage" instead of "equal human rights" makes Middle America think of two dudes fucking instead of people people uniting through love, and consequently they vote for a marriage amendment. It sounds so simple and infuriating because it is. Not thinking about when or why or if our thoughts or terms of usage become framed/loaded/game schema'd can only hurt us, as melodramatic as that sounds. It's important, at least to me, to think about who and why we question, especially about their sexuality, because when we think it's okay to do something it's probably because we've been told that it's okay, and probably for a specific purpose. I literally just wanted to bring that up because it made me crazy that no one was saying it. I don't know what you got out of it, but it certainly wasn't that, and for that I apologize. I can't help but be apologetic every time I post here because all I'm doing is hijacking this post and then defending what I said because I wasn't articulate enough to pull it off the first go 'round. I regret that I am not as succinct as you are, Shwenn.

I understand that perhaps you are talking down to people who call themselves bisexual out of respect for actual bisexual people. This is not a viewpoint that I had thought of beforehand, and I actually appreciate it (as well as DowntownAmber for bringing it up last night). In response I can only say: as an actual bisexual person, I don't find this any more or less respectful than any other action, nor of any particular use, so I just don't get it. Saying someone might "have the audacity" to call themselves bisexual when they are not (and feeling the need to be angry/put them in their place by calling them "so-called") makes it seem like bisexuality is some pure, high state of being that gets sullied somehow by too many people misusing it. My qualm is not with the fact that people have different criteria for whether or not someone is bisexual and can rule people in or out of this category in their brains. It's that questioning or belittling or mistrusting any actual person who claims they are bisexual, even if they are not truly bisexual, does not do anything positive for the world. Even if it seems like we need to be defenders of the true faith, perhaps keeping out the not-truly-bi riffraff, I still say that someone else acting on their own sexuality, whether or not I think it is valid, does nothing to devalue my own. I don't know why it would devalue anyone else's or otherwise be a perceivable detriment besides proprietary annoyance (which is totally allowed, btw). This argument is not the intention of my post, but apparently the intention of the thread that I missed the first time, and this is the best way that I can process and respond to it. What are we, worried about street cred, here?

In closing, I'm sorry again to everyone who had to see these huge blocks of very unfun text in an otherwise fun place, or felt as though I was attacking them. I don't even usually post on forums because they make me nervous, lol, so I'm going to run away now and stop saying the same shit over and over :P Until, of course, I can pithy my life back up. I hope I made some sense, Shwenn, and I'll stop wasting the internet now.