By David Futrelle
Lesbians around the world face a deep existential crisis today as it has been revealed that they do not, in fact, exist. At least according to some dudes on the internet. Specifically, some dudes on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, long a hotbed of Lesbian Denial.
In a recent discussion, a commenter by the name of NathanHollister explained that so-called “lesbians” are just straight women who can’t find quality men.
Lesbianism is not real. It’s just women who are sick and tired of unmasculine, wussy, spineless soyboy men. They will magically turn straight for a real sexy, charming man.
Basically, women who cannot find a top 20% man become lesbians. Women who can find a top 20% man but also are kinky sluts become “bi”, but mainly because they know a threesome with another girl would turn their man on.
Other commenters agreed with the “can’t get a man” theory.
“Lesbians only exist because Chad said ‘no’ and didn’t give them attention,” declared edgysecularist.
Still others feel that lesbianism is more about the hatred of men than the lack of them. According to bbhuntt:
Any ‘lesbian’ Is really a straight person who doesn’t like men and is willing to have intercourse with women rather than not have intercourse. …
Being a lesbian is the ultimate move of feminist and nothing more. It’s all a giant game
Sir_manalot suggested that it was also about status, as no one apparently has more status than women today.
[W]omen just fuck whoever they believe is highest on the social chain. Right now, women are being given a bunch of unearned power and so lesbianism is in.
Fortunately for men — or at least for the cis men who make up the overwhelming majority of MGTOWs — they have one great advantage over all these fake lesbians. And it can be found in their pants.
“You have a dick and they don’t,” wrote rejac218.
They will never know what a woman’s pussy really feels like from balls deep. You should laugh right at them.
But of course as MGTOWs they don’t spend any time at all fantasizing about said pussies. Nope! As SprinterLyfe reminded his fellow Own-Way-Goers:
Pussy is all women have to offer. By placing little or no value on pussy, we regain control of ourselves, finding legitimate freedom from feminized cultures bent on enslavement and domination of men by women.
And there’s no greater proof of the freedom these men have from women than their tendency to discuss these completely unimportant-to-them women angrily on the internet all day every day while talking about how cool their dicks are. That’s what male freedom looks like!
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Slightly OT but related to the site generally: there is a podcast called “Behind the Bastards” which takes a look at shitty people throughout history. They have an episode in their archives I just listened to about “Ragnar Redbeard”, the (pseudonymous) author of “Might is Right“, which was namedropped by the scumbag behind the Gilroy Garlic Festival mass shooting last summer and has been the inspiration for other assorted MRA/ RW shitgoblins over the years. It’s a grim listen despite the presenters’ attempts to keep it light-hearted, as much as for how much of this guy’s life and thoughts match up so perfectly with modern manospherian thought: it could have been written yesterday instead of a century ago.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-ragnar-redbeard-the-patron-50418883/
Sorry for late comment:
In Beetlejuice, don’t the ghosts usually carry the marks of how they died? I was under the impression from his appearance that Beetlejuice himself had died from industrial – grade dissipation (loosely speaking, partying too hard.)
@Kevin
I looked it up and on the fandom wiki it says that he died from hanging himself after the woman he loved left him. They say the because he was a former civil servant in the after life which is what happens to people that took their own lives in the Beetlejuice world.
(Not really @ Katamount, but general commentary)
They’re off by one letter. My ‘lesbian attraction’ isn’t for the gratification of men; it’s for the gratification of me.
(I know, not a lesbian, but I couldn’t resist the joke. Also given that a lot of dudebro types seem to lump all non-straight women together under under the label of “lesbian”, I’d think that I’d mostly qualify anyway.)
I’ve noted that the mainstream porn industry basically splits things into four genres:
Straight – At least one cis woman, any number of cis men which aren’t involved with each other (“lesbian” is a sub-genre of “straight”).
Gay – Cis men only.
Bisexual – At least one cis woman, at least two cis men, the men are involved with both sexes. I haven’t seen any with F/F side scenes, so I’m not sure if that exists. In cases where there are only three recognized categories, this is inconsistently lumped with either “gay” or “straight”.
Sh***** (Starred out in case it hits a filter): At least one transwoman.
I’ve never seen or heard of anything involving trans men or openly nonbinary people in mainstream porn; that’s purely the domain of niche indie porn.
So clearly, the labels are primarily from the point of view of a male audience. This already subtly alienates a lot of women. Of course this is hardly an original observation; people have mentioned things along those lines since the ’80s at least, and probably longer.
I’ve also noted that an awful lot of mainstream porn is, at least from my perspective, not merely unsexy but irritating. For most of my life I simply wrote it off as “porn isn’t really my thing” without really exploring why. It wasn’t until a few years ago when I checked out the big aggregator sites like Pornhub that I figured it out.
For a lot of M/F porn, it comes off as a woman masturbating with a dildo attached to a mannequin and not even enjoying it all that much despite apparently achieving orgasm. (A bit exaggerated, but hopefully you get what I mean.) For a lot of F/F porn, it’s like they’re not all that into each other, and distracted by what they really want to do, which is hump the camera.
…Which honestly might actually be the case, given that a lot of F/F scenes are done by straight actresses; I watched one recently where one woman really seemed to be into it but the other was like “um, yeah, I’d rather be somewhere else, I guess I should look lovingly at the camera or something even though I kind of suck at that too?”
(If it matters, M/M and trans porn can go the equivalent of either way. Bisexual porn and the rare “Playgirl” style straight porn tends to be like regular straight porn, except it’s the man who’s unenjoyably masturbating on a mannequin.)
I figured out that what I really want to see is two or more people who are genuinely into each other. I want to emphasize with the connection they have, even if that connection is that of a casual encounter gone really well and not a real relationship. I want to emphasize with their enjoyment of the experience, something that I can’t do if they’re constantly distracted from each other or mindlessly humping someone who is little more than an object. (For all the complaints that straight porn can be dehumanizing to women, from my perspective, the dehumanization of men is even worse.) If I can’t do those things, then porn does less than nothing and I’d be better off using my own imagination.
I can’t speak for other women; for all the sex-positivity conversations I’ve had, it’s never come up except in passing, and even then, only rarely. But I can’t help but think that a lot more women and even some men would be more accepting of porn (and porn itself would subtly change) if there was some way of sorting out the emotional connection approach from the mindlessly physical approach in the easy-to-find stuff. It also might result in fewer people having toxic attitudes about sex, if more teenagers have their early experiences with the former rather than the latter. (I know, they probably shouldn’t be seeing it at all, but I first watched porn when I was 14 and there wasn’t even an internet. Some of them are going to, regardless.)
@Snowberry
The only trans* man in mainstream porn that I can think of is Buck Angel, who seems to have appeared in mostly gay scenes. He’s truscum, though, so do not support him. As for non-binary people, the only non-binary or genderqueer person in anything close to mainstream that comes to mind is Jiz Lee.
I’m assuming there are so few of those groups because the presumed cishet male viewer isn’t interested.
Regarding the dehumanization of men, here’s something I saw a while ago. The current porn industry definitely has some issues, though to me it seems like more of those impact women than men.
I’ll have to tell the lesbians I know that they aren’t real. They’ll be so disappointed.
Oh, they’ve included bi women too. Lovely! Let’s see how I fit:
Not sure. I have a boyfriend now, but I haven’t ranked him numerically on arbitrary parameters. Strangely, my concern was more “someone who gets along with me and whom I get along with.”
but also are kinky sluts become “bi”, but mainly because they know a threesome with another girl would turn their man on.
Puh-leese. I am not only too shy for a threesome, I’m also WAY too uncoordinated.
…
@Crip Dyke – About more serious matters, thanks for your advice last week and sorry I didn’t answer then. I didn’t end up writing directly to the person whose brother died but I passed along a more general message.
No! The mammoth ate the second quote (i.e., I messed it up). It was supposed to be like:
Anyway!
Ah, lesbian erasure, that oldest and most boring of heterosexist hot takes.
“But but but they need us! They can’t possibly not need us! How can they feel whole and safe without big aggressive males protecting them and controlling their lives?”
Nope, we don’t need you. Your machismo is not useful to us. Fuck off.
I’m not an expert, but I was under the impression that “lesbian” was, for a long time, the go-to term for all WLW in queer communities around the world? Plus, well, I gather the historical data is somewhat vague, but I was also under the impression that Sappho herself had some male lovers as well. The classification hasn’t always been clear and strict, unless I’m dramatically misinformed.
@Diptych
I think I read the same thing. And IIRC the term lesbian originally described bisexual women as well, it was the political lesbians who argued for it to be a more specific term.
ETA: There’s apparently debate among historians over whether Sappho was a lesbian at all:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho#Sexuality
@Naglfar:
I’ve heard of Buck Angel, but wasn’t aware he was considered mainstream. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that Cracked article before. It seems familiar, at any rate.
@Diptych:
Yes, but before my time, and I’m in my 40s. I didn’t see any useful reason to bring that up. Also, asexual women aren’t generally WLW, yet I’ve seen them get tossed in the “lesbian” pile as well. Of course, that’s not entirely consistent, but you know, they’ve only got two categories.
@Myself:
It’s much easier to empathize if the porn emphasizes it. Typo or slip? Unsure.
@ Snowberry:
If you’re not averse to anime or M/M scenes, there’s a hentai called Sensitive Pornograph that totally fits this. It’s two short vignettes, the first about two manga artists in love who are utterly besotted with each other (mild angst from a brief miscommunication, but they’re still cute).
The second is possibly a bit problematic, but has a happy ending. A petsitter comes to an apt to take care of a rabbit and instead finds a naked man bound and cuffed in the closet – the sub of an abusive Dom (no onscreen violence) who enjoys such unethical games. Of course the sub seduces the petsitter into sex, but once they get down to it, they go at it with singular focus, in nearly total silence. What I dislike most about porn (incl. hentai) is the always fake-sounding vocalizations to show they’re “enjoying” it, so this was really a breath of fresh air to me. They’re just very much in the moment and the pleasure and nothing else exists but the two of them.
Anyway, tmi, but I thought I’d suggest it.
@Snowberry
He might not be considered mainstream, he was just the only trans* masc porn actor I have heard of. Sorry if I was incorrect.
@Prith kDar:
Yep, I’ll totally go for fujoshi stuff too, if it’s done right. I’ll put it down on my list of things to check out, along with Naglfar’s mention of Jiz Lee above.
(My first exposure to hentai was La Blue Girl. That one was so WTF that I was too weirded out to really be horrified, offended, or turned on. For those who haven’t heard of it, from what I remember it started out with ninja combat using sex magic and ended with incestuous demon rape.)
Let me just say that just because some people say that Buck Angel is truscum doesn’t mean that Buck Angel is truscum.
It is possible to articulate that having discomfort with one’s body is different from having discomfort with integrating one’s notion of oneself with social aspects of gender. There are reasons we have both the word transsexual and the word transgender, and it’s important to be able to describe all the different ways people experience transness.
From what I’ve seen, what Buck Angel said that others took to be the statement of a truscum is that he’s transsexual not transgender. He’s never said (that I know of) and he’s never even been alleged to have said (again, TIKO) that being transsexual is better than being transgender.
Ironically, if you’re not allowed to talk about how your experience of your own transness differs from how other people experience transness, that is also setting up a single, one right way to be trans. And, of course, that is the problem with the real truscum.
If I say that I have dysphoria as a result of my relationship with my body and that that is best described with the word transsexual and not with the word transgender, that’s not at all the same thing as truscum who say that if you don’t experience body dysphoria you’re not really trans.
In one case you’re talking about your own experience, and it’s okay to be the authority on your own experience. In the other you’re gatekeeping other persons’ access to trans community and social legitimacy, and that’s straight fucked up.
Unless you are prepared to quote someone doing the latter, I’d be extremely wary of labeling someone truscum.
Mainstream porn is formatted to alway be the same, and society have the expectation that all cis men should find that specific format enjoyable, as other have exposed already. Trying to find porn that is different and well done is A – extremely hard and time consuming, B – expose you to nastiness you prefer to never have seen ever and C – probably won’t find what you seek anyway.
The main thing to remember is that they are not even made to please only cis men : they are not made to please anyone but to follow a formula and hope for the best. There’s barely any alternative anyway, and thoses alternatives quite often skirt into the illegal (see: people that exchange photos without attribution and that seem to be taken without consents for a relatively “tame” example).
I know the rule goes that there is porn of everything, but the reality is that often, there seem to not exist or be vanishingly hard to find.
> Ooglyboggles
I hope you’ll find a job which suit you fine, then ! Let us know if you are successfull in this regard, if it is not too personal to say.
Search for “feminist porn” (with quotes, so you don’t just get feminists talking about porn) and then choose search options for videos rather than all pages.
If you do that, you’ll consistently get pretty different stuff than you would otherwise. If you add in search terms, like [“feminist porn” threesome] or whatever floats your boat you can get to something that has a very different point of view than you might otherwise find.
Despite the name, “Chicks Out West” AKA “Girls Out West” is a company that is pretty good at producing things that does sex+context rather than “sex with no plot or context” or “all plot for twenty minutes and then three minutes of sex at the end”. They’ve won awards for their quality and have vids with (apparently) cis women only, vids with AFAB trans folks, and vids with (apparently) cis guys. I think they also have AMAB folks in some vids (they’ve certainly expressed interest in doing good AMAB-trans* inclusive porn during interviews), but I’ve never seen that.
While I prefer written sex scenes that I can read so I can more easily reimagine the scene as needed, I do watch video porn sometimes for other-than-academic-interest and I have watched COW/GOW porn as part of that.
What’s interesting is that when I do go looking for (video) porn, I usually find a company or site where the style is obviously different from mainstream and more to my tastes long before I find a specific video I want to watch. Basically you find good people, then you search through their catalog once you know the company/performer to include in your search. Whether you browse through their videos or do a new search within that catalog, either way finding the right creators is a much better first step to get you what you’re looking for than finding the right plot/ scene/ fetishes/ behaviors.
In fact, what I thought I might want to watch changes pretty drastically once I come across a good, feminist company with delightful performers. Watching people (appear to) truly enjoy themselves is much more erotic to me than specifying exactly what positions and acts will be in a scene with people who are either going through the motions or using their enthusiasm to say, “Fuck Yeah! More Sex! Harder, Harder!” a whole bunch. Yelling a lot or being extreme for the sake of being extreme doesn’t really tell me if you’re having a good time and really wanting to be there.
In short: look for good humans and not for good porn. If there are good humans involved, good porn will follow.
@Crip Dyke:
Sigh. Why did I not know that? I should have somehow heard about that sort of thing by now. Thank you. That helps a lot, really. Gives me a place to start from, at least.
@ Lainy
Thanks for the heads – up, can’t believe i never picked up on his resemblance to Ixtab.
@Crip Dyke
Some quotes:
He seems to think only binary people are valid.
He retweets some TERFs because they share a dislike of non-binary people.
Declares non-binary people don’t deserve transition.
Bonds with Graham Linehan and defends him
There’s more out there, this is just what I found now. He’s made it clear that he opposes non-binary people and seems to desire to gatekeep, so I’m going to go with “truscum” to describe him. I am in no way accusing all transsexuals of being truscum or anything like that, I am merely calling one specific person out.
Definitely in agreement about issues with mainstream porn, especially how it presents men. The idea makes sense – porn is a fantasy, so the presumed straight male viewer projects himself into the male performer, so they don’t want the male talent to have any of that pesky “identity.”
I remember an interview where a performer (Lee Stone, I think?) was like “Why I you talking to me? I am a headless thrusting torso.” (“Behind-the-scenes videos, incidentally, are an easy reminder of how many claims by SWERF liars like Gail Dines are complete BS.)
And like Naglfar, when I tried to think of mainstream performers that are not cis or are nonbinary, I came up with Jiz Lee and that’s it.
There are decent scenes, where the performers clearly like each other and are enjoying themselves, but yeah, you do have to search. You’d think more people would tag videos with things like “laughter.”
@Allandrel
That would also explain the popularity of POV scenes from the perspective of the man, as that seems like it would be easy to project oneself into.
One would think so. It seems like something a lot of people would like to see.
@Crip Dyke
I really appreciate you, so can you not?
Buck Angel has said so many untrue things it’s astounding that anybody but a transmedicalist would still care about what he says.
He’s one if those “if you don’t have the checklist problems you’re not trans*” ways of thinking.
He’s trying to gatekeep our community.
I don’t have the quote anymore, but iirc he has said you can’t be trans* without dysphoria.
He frequently attacks other trans* folk and takes the sides of known TERFS.
Transmeds ARE truscum.
He’s also very misogynistic in some ways if I recall.
@Nagflar
Thank you.
He’s a very problematic person.
@Naglfar:
There may indeed be gatekeeping/truscum quotes out there said by Buck Angel, but I keep seeing your first link used as evidence and that has made me skeptical of everything else.
Please read that first quote again:
There is literally nothing in there that invalidates anyone else’s experience. He’s speaking entirely about his own experience and says that he doesn’t fit a certain category. He never once in this quote says anything at all about whether someone else fits into that same category. He never in this quote comments on anyone else’s “validity” or “transness” or access to medical care. He literally speaks only about himself.
Again, I’m not saying that he’s not truscum, but when people repeatedly use someone narrating their own experience as an example of trying to control others’ experience, I get highly skeptical of their ability to make good judgements about who constitutes truscum.
If we can’t be the authorities on our own lives, where does that end? How do you say that it’s bad that Buck Angel defines his own identity yet still argue for the right to define your own?
As for your other links, the Lily Maynard link is bad, but it doesn’t go to Buck Angel, just to Maynard. Do you have Angel’s tweet? Does he comment on Maynard’s statement? Is it critical? Is it cryptic? If he includes either no comment or a cryptic comment that could be interpreted in many different ways, I wouldn’t want to label Angel truscum on that basis either … especially since so many people seem to have made up their minds that he’s truscum based on that first quote which only narrates his own experience.
The third link is to a story about Angel, and it may very well be true, but I don’t get to read what Angel wrote or hear what Angel said.
Your fourth link is broken.
I am not hostile to the idea that Angel is truscum, but I am hostile to the idea that defining ourselves without mentioning other people is somehow truscum behavior. And the rest of the evidence that you’ve provided either doesn’t have any statements at all by Angel (the Maynard and broken links), or only has a story about Angel in someone else’s words.
And, honestly, I would consider that story about Angel to be enough except that no one ever seems to call Angel truscum without citing that first quote, and I disagree that that could possibly be evidence of truscum behavior.
It is in the context of this repeated misuse – misuse in my perception, I realize other people may judge it differently – of your first piece of evidence that I’m reluctant to accept only one story that contains no record of Angel’s exact words.
NB folks deserve all our support, but I’m simply not willing to call someone truscum without what I consider to be good evidence.
Transsexual people, too, face unique barriers. During the transsexual/transgender conflicts in the Nineties that led to the adoption of the term “trans*”, the entire reason we needed that unifying adjective was because non-transsexual transgender people were speaking over transsexual people and agreeing with TERFs that transsexual folk were self-mutilating and delusional while there was a strong and vocal minority among transsexual folk that pushed back by saying that transgender folk weren’t “really” trans.
I lived through those days and I know what people sounded like back then. Buck Angel sounds exactly like the people on the transsexual-but-not-transgender side who were ready to embrace the word “trans*” and wanted cross-community collaboration but still believed that it was important to believe that this was a meeting of different experiences and was very wary of people who don’t medically transition speaking over the voices of people who were medically transitioning or had already done so.
Those voices were conciliatory, trying to build mutually supportive communities, but also cautious because they had been hurt and pissed because people with no experience with medical transition were going on Oprah and whatever the fuck and not just talking about what there experiences were but also bad mouthing people who medically transition as not liberated, not feminist, and ultimately responsible for the gender oppression of others.
Angel says, “I’m binary”. I’ve never heard him say, “And everyone else is binary too, whether they believe it or not.”
Truscum means something. Although I blame cis* folks for creating truscum – if doctors hadn’t required trans* people wanting medical transition to parrot a hard-line, “there is one true way to be trans” ideology to get medical care, then even the ones stupid enough to believe that wouldn’t necessarily have been invested in pushing it. And when they did, other people would be free to push back with no risk of harm.
But when Angel transitioned, the gatekeepers were fucking fierce. And it was ***hard as fuck*** to get medical insurance to pay for anything. You had to tell people that this was literally, absolutely necessary. You had to say you had no complicated feelings at all. You usually (though not always) had to flat out lie to get your care. So when some friend or acquaintance of yours started acting like a truscum asshole, you had to think twice about whether you wanted to speak up in defense of transgender and NB folks.
These dynamics through the 80s kept the “true transsexual” ideology alive, but as an integrated community – transgender and transsexual – we fought back against those clinic policies and those fucked up clinic dynamics.
And we won. The Margaret O’Hartigans of the world were forced to the margins instead of intimidating the fuck out of trans people – transsexual, transgender, nb, binary, what have you – who didn’t support their gender-rigid scheme.
But people from that time who aren’t O’Hartigan still exist. And, apparently, a number of them still use language from that time. Angel says, “I’m binary”. Okay. We said that back then. But you know what? It wasn’t against NB people. It was only because we acknowledged NB people existed that it would ever occur to us to say that some of us were binary. Saying “I’m binary” is that acknowledgement that NB people exists. You have to have more than that to make the case that someone is anti-NB.
And, again, I’m perfectly open to evidence. That Maynard person is horrible. It makes me uncomfortable just to hear that Angel retweeted Maynard, but after so many people are saying that just describing yourself as binary is an attack on NB folks, I’m not actually going to condemn Angel until I see more evidence.
I mean, when someone says, “I’m not trans,” is that an attack on trans* people? Couldn’t that just be someone being very careful not to appropriate someone else’s experience? Like saying, “Hey, I can’t speak to what it means to be trans*, because I’m not trans*.” Couldn’t Angel be saying, “Hey, I am not interested in people mistaking me for belonging to X community, because my own experience is y”?
All Angel’s subsequent clarifications seem to indicate he was going for that latter. And if you even read the reply thread to that initial comment, the replies that actually happened at the time before Angel could possibly have known that people would think this was evidence he was truscum, what do you find?
i see things like this (replying to a suspended account, so I can’t see the statement that motivated this one of Angel’s replies):
He’s using a happy, friendly, generous tone throughout. He doesn’t attack others.
one person says,
to which Angel replies:
Although lots of people describe Angel as trans, my understanding (and I could EASILY be wrong, so just drop me a quote if I am) is that he bills himself in porn as “the man with a vagina”. Not “the trans* man”.
So… yeah. I hope you don’t feel attacked, Naglfar. I’m not opposed to you, personally, but you said,
while quoting as evidence Angel only talking about his own experience, identity, and journey.
As someone whose ID and experience and journey has been repeatedly questioned, as someone who has had people tell them over and over that my life and my gender don’t make sense, I get pretty sensitive when someone says that a person describing their own gender is an attack on someone else, or even just evidence that the person describing their own gender is thinking that other people’s genders are invalid.
If we really accept that, then no work for social change is possible, because as soon as you talk about your gender, you’re saying mine is invalid, and same with every other person across the globe.
If you don’t want to listen to Angel talk about his gender and his experience, that’s fine. But to say that talking about ourselves is attacking others reminds me a hell of a lot of the bullshit that kept me in the closet past the age of 20.