Apparently there’s been a lot of discussion on Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs in the blogsphere, but I’m not really here to discuss that. What I want to talk about is Amanda’s post, Getting approval (which discusses the girls-kissing-girls part of the raunch culture), and my own experiences with it.

First things first: I am bisexual (or pansexual, more accurately). For years and years and years various things kept me closeted to myself and to those around me, but I finally came out sometime in 2003/2004. It was hard for me, especially since I was met with some scepticism from loved ones. My mother believed that people were “gay, straight, or lying” (to borrow from that hideously stupid study done a while back) and a friend said that I had to be mistaken, that I was confusing love/lust for “appreciation” of the female body. It didn’t help matters that I’ve only had one real sexual experience with a girl, especially since neither of us had any interest in pursuing anything outside of that one encounter.

So what does my personal story have to do with the pressure for straight girls to kiss each other? More than I care to admit, but admit I will.

First off, it was one of the “various things” that kept me closeted; I pushed my attraction to girls into the deepest recesses of my mind, telling myself that since I was attracted to boys I had to be heterosexual, any crushes I had were just “girl crushes”, and pursuing my attraction would just be me giving in to the “fad” of girl kissing.

The second is that after I had come out, I fell right into the viper pit I had tried so dearly to avoid. My biggest failing was that I wanted to kiss those pretty girls. I thought it would make me happy, but it didn’t. In fact, it made me feel ashamed, unhappy, and angry. Ashamed because I had known better than to do that, but I still had given into the pressure of one of my guy friends (who never would have suggested such a thing to me when I was IDing as hetero) and the straight girls who wanted to please him and/or wanted the attention of the other guys around. Unhappy because those girls didn’t want me. And angry at them for kissing me anyway, angry at my friend for pressuring both of us into it, and angry at a culture that normalizes and encourages such destructive behaviour.

I’m with easilyirritable when sie says:

I really, really, really fucking hate the fact that our culture is such that every attempt I might make towards owning my sexuality is thwarted by the fact that the majority of men in the world will take it as me trying to turn them on, when really all I want to do is turn myself on.