zhalaya's field
Emotions, thoughts, feelings & advice. Always in truth and always complete
Sabine Pearlman has won the Lens Culture New & Emerging photographers award 2013 for her cross sections of ammunition with over 900 specimens revealing a hidden beautiful complexity to something we see as simple and destructive
Read the full article here
“A lot of the time when you tell someone that you’re bisexual, they ask for your credentials. They ask how many men have you dated? How many women have you dated? Which one do you prefer? Which one have you had more sex with? These are incredibly personal questions that you wouldn’t ask a straight or gay person, but bisexuality has “less validity” so we get asked all these stupid, intimate questions. And if you don’t want to answer then someone will make assumptions about you but if you do answer, and the fact is out of the three people you fucked two of them are one gender and one of them is the other then people will decide whether you are gay or straight, they’ll make the decision for you.”
Oh, man. While it’s hard to choose between what I’ve come to think of as Bi 20 Questions (you’re not bi without them! Or with them! Or at all; you’re not bi. Don’t you get it?), I think my favorite is one that isn’t mentioned here. I’ve gotten it in a number of different variations: “But what if you end up with a man, won’t you be straight?” and “But what if you end up with a woman, won’t you be a lesbian?” and, of course, the one get really gets to the heart of it, “But what happens when you settle down with someone and really decide?” (For those of you playing along at home, the correct answer to this line of questioning is, “Were you less [your sexuality] when you were a virgin? What about when you were single? No? You weren’t? Fantastic; shut up.”)
The thing is, I’m always so confused about what the goal is with this shit, and I feel like this question — the “But what happens when you end up with someone for a long time??” question — really gets to the heart of why. Because man oh man, I have been asked this question by straight folk and gay folk, peers and superiors, people I’m dating, even a boss one time, and every last one of them has done it the same way: like they’re the Encyclopedia fucking Brown of my sexuality. Like they’ve just uncovered the fatal flaw in my plan to Dupe Good Citizens Into Believing I Like Fucking Dudes & Ladies. Half the time I expect them to point and yell “Aha!” maybe while jumping out of a bush or something for effect.
Like. What is the theory here, folks who do this? Are you just so uncomfortable with the idea of bisexuality that you have to believe it’s all a scheme? Are you so self-obsessed that the thought of me lying about my sexual orientation for the sole purpose of ~pulling the wool over your eyes~ makes more sense to you than that thought that it’s, I don’t know, actually the way I swing? Are you waiting for me to pull off my mask and reveal the monosexual person underneath while yelling, “I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling assholes?” Whatever it is, kindly let it the fuck go, will you? Find some other mystery to chase, because I promise you, The Case of Who I Like to Fuck has been solved for a loooong time.
(via gyzym)I can totally relate to this, I ended up with a man but I can honestly say that I am Bi.
(via gyzym)
consider the bank.
You know, a few months ago this dude friend of mine showed up to hang out with me all dejected. Over a couple of drinks he explained his long face — earlier that night, he’d been walking down the street behind this really cute girl, and when she looked back at him over her shoulder, he thought it was in interest and smiled at her. Now, this guy is tall and skinny, can most commonly be found in glasses and t-shirts scrawled across with math jokes, is kind to animals, considers himself a feminist. What he doesn’t consider himself is threatening, so he was surprised, confused, and even hurt by what happened next: the girl in front of him responding to his called greeting of, “Nice skirt,” by taking off down the darkened street in a dead run.
“Yeah,” I said, “she probably thought you were going to rape her.”
“But that’s not fair,” he said. “I’m a good person; I’d never rape anyone! How could she think that? She doesn’t even know me.”
Out here in the wilds of the internet, I often find myself making arguments about shit like feminism and rape culture unilaterally. For one thing, there’s so much (like, so much) out there arguing unilaterally against this shit that I feel it’s necessary; for another thing, ‘round these parts there’s a lot of people jumping to hostility when it’s painfully clear they don’t have a handle on all the facts. But I’m more lenient with the people in my real life, especially dudes like the one mentioned above. I’m willing to extend to them a patience that I wouldn’t with strangers on the internet, because they matter to me, and it matters to me that they understand. So when my friend sat there that night, whining over his beer and responding to my attempted explanations with, “But I’d love it if a girl smiled at me on the street, or even catcalled at me! Fuck, even if a dude did it, I’d be flattered,” I decided to spend some time thinking about how to clear things up for him. It took awhile, but I finally came up with a metaphor to get the job done:
Consider the bank.
Omg, I have been looking for something like this! Thank you!
