The Unit of Caring

more problems with safe spaces

A lot of women get told that there’s a sort of person you should be attracted to. In some cultures that’s ‘you should like decent men, the problem with the world is that women go for bad boys’. In some it’s 'you want a man you can look up to’ and in some it’s 'into older men? you’ve got daddy issues.“ Sometimes it’s 'it’s shallow not to be attracted to X people. You didn’t strike me as a shallow type. I thought you were better than that.” In some cultures it’s 'you shouldn’t be attracted to anyone, female sexuality is gross.’

A lot of men get told that they should always be having sex with attractive people, and that there’s a very specific band of people they should find attractive. That turning down sex with someone in the socially approved category makes you gay or a total loser or a failure as a man. One consequence of compulsory sexuality is that men are pressured into having sex they do not want or with people they are not attracted to, because otherwise they aren’t taken seriously as people. 

The language of 'why don’t you want sex with [category of person]?’ is very charged to a lot of people. It treats female sexuality as instrumental, a means of distributing sex to the desirable sort of people. It treats male sexuality as a bar for social approval.  Lots of people have had it used against them to convince them to have sex they didn’t want. A lot of people now have an instinctive defensive reaction to 'you should find [group of people] sexy, there’s something wrong with you if you don’t’.

This is a problem.

Here’s another problem: preferences are culturally mediated. There are huge groups of people who are constructed as not desirable, never desirable. And they’re rightly lashing out against that and saying 'we are sexy, we are gorgeous, we can name the various societal ills that told us otherwise and we can tell them to go fuck themselves. And if people don’t see that, it’s because they can’t question those culturally mediated preferences of theirs.’

And every once in a while I see these two norms collide, and it’s invariably ugly.

Have you ever noticed how when someone says 'lesbian spaces are cissexist’ or 'gay social spaces are fatphobic’ or 'disabled people aren’t thought of as sexual’, someone invariably pops up to say 'well, sorry, but I just don’t find trans people/fat people/disabled people’ attractive?’

Those people are jackasses who are engaging in hurtful behavior, often in a safe space, in order to hammer across a message that society has already sent through loud and clear. It might be true but it’s not necessary or kind. And a lot of spaces have wisely adopted the norm to tell those people to go to hell.

I’ve been trying to come up with a general theory of which preferences are okay to publicly express, and for a while one of my tenets was 'if you don’t find a category of people attractive, shut up, please, forever.’ Because saying it does obvious harm - to the people who prompted your unwelcome statement of preferences by opening up about their experience of exclusion and desexualization, and to any other people who read your thing, internalize it, and take it as collateral damage.

And I couldn’t think how saying it did any good - yes, okay, you have preferences, no one is saying you don’t have preferences, no one is making you stop acting on them, it won’t kill you to spend ten minutes thinking about them.

It was in a conversation about the first of these two things that I finally saw the problem with my 'shut up, forever, please’ tenet. 

Because people have a strong defensive reaction to 'you should find X people sexy.’ They have this reaction even if they aren’t cissexist or fatphobic or ableist, even. They have it because 'you should find X people sexy’ is often followed up by 'you owe them a chance’. And 'you owe them a chance’ is insidious and can take a thousand forms, many of them subtle and invisible and still profoundly damaging. 

I think some fraction of the obnoxious people saying, 'but I just don’t find X people attractive!!!’ are trying and failing to articulate this:

 I have a really strong instinctive 'no stop telling me who to be attracted to and what it says about me’ reaction to the thing you’re saying. I feel like acknowledging 'yes my preferences cause harm to people’ is giving leverage to a pattern of thought where my sexuality gets distributed to people who deserve it. I feel like 'but I am not attracted to X people' has to be sufficient, has to be respected, for me to feel safe. I feel like 'well maybe you should question that’ is an open-ended obligation to improve my sexuality toward your ends. 

And so 'shut up and keep hurtful preferences to yourself’ doesn’t work, not if we want everyone to hear the message 'your sexuality isn’t something that gets distributed to the deserving. Your 'no’ is always good enough. Experiencing or not experiencing attraction does not make you a bad person, ever.' 

And yet.

Preferences are culturally mediated! There are lots of people who would totally be attracted to trans people and to fat people and to disabled people and to every other constructed-as-undesirable category of people if they asked themselves about it! There are even more people who would be attracted to those groups if they hadn’t been raised saturated by media messages about what beauty is!  We should be angry about this! We should say things about this!

…and when we do, people will hear 'your sexuality makes you a bad person, fix it, fix yourself’, and they respond 'but I’m just not attracted to Xs’, and they aren’t wrong either, and telling them to shut up is not as obvious or as necessary as it once seemed to me. 

I have no idea how to fix this.

• 6 November 2014
• #cw: fatphobia#cw: transphobia#cw: cissexism#cw: more SJy than is usual for these parts#cw: compulsory sexuality#original sj content
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