On Being Straight

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I’m a woman who is kinky, sex-positive and heterosexual. And perhaps a calmer saner rationaler person would leave this post at that.

Not me though. You know that.

So one Saturday morning I was at home with my boyfriends Pan and Jack. (God, though, I love the polyamory. Not in a deep way. Not in an adult emotionally controlled way. I am the least emotionally controlled person who has ever lived. (Seriously – wire me up to machines and check – it’s fine with me so long as they are these kind of machines.) No, I love polyamory in the shallowest of ways: I have two boyfriends and whenever they go out on dates I am all: ‘hur hur see, I told you my boyfriend was hot.’ I r0×0r. (God – sorry – I know it is embarrassing when grown ups in their mid-thirties talk like that. But, honestly, no one is more embarrassed than me.))

So, where I was before that tangent just then, was on my sofa, reading my paper, with my two boyfs. Right. And was I wallowing in my own suberbity? Hell, no. I was enraged.

Enraged I tell you! Enraged!

I was reading this piece in the Saturday Guardian. And I was enraged. You could have smelted iron ore on the enragement part of my brain. (If you want to know which part of my brain that is you could always wire me up to a machine and say, ‘Goddess, may this worthless worm worship your pussy.’ Don’t forget what kind of machine it has to be now.)

Now, you may be wondering why this piece enraged me. Is it because the guy writing the letter is so fucking determined to have a small cock despite all the evidence that he has a perfectly normal cock. (motivation: I don’t care if you’re being nice or nasty about it so long as you keep on talking about my cock!) Actually no, lamecore as that is, it’s this that pissed me off. At the end of the answer after 3 trillion words about how much cocks vary:

The vagina accommodates what’s offered

The reason this makes me froth isn’t because of the whole thing where of course size matters. Different cocks feel different. Different shapes and sizes work better than others. But it’s way more complicated than what your ruler tells you.

I’m crosser even than usual, because this statement - viewed as a kind of meta - just it feels like such a perfect encapsulation of the way female sexuality is viewed by everyone from Freud up. The vagina accommodates what’s offered! Yeah, right. Female sexuality will basically adjust itself to meet the needs of whatever is being asked of it.

‘Cause as we all know female sexuality is all fluid and undefined.

Thus a sexually liberated woman will simply be open to anything. Any sexual experience at all. Being whatever is convenient. In a way that men are simply not expected to be.

In fact, it often feels like if you are a woman who is sex positive you are required to be an adventuress, constantly searching for new things that might turn you on. You are required not to rule anything out or you’re not really playing the game. And ruling out the sex with women? How lame.

It’s hard to write this in some ways. Yes I am aware of homophobia and the straight privilege I enjoy (and that a lot of bisexual identified women also enjoy), but there are wheels within wheels. In the most conservative parts of society it is only acceptable to be straight, but I don’t live there. I live in a world where it is normal for women to shrug and say ‘but women are soft and smell so good,’ like I’m a fool for giving up on half the world.

(Actually men smell good too – they smell like sex. Like fucking. And softness has never been one of my most sought after states in a partner. I have all the soft we’re gonna need.)

I mean really, truly, I have been accused of ‘flaunting’ my hetness on this blog. Why? Cause I mention it? And I mention it because it’s a big part of who I am and, unlike in the big bad reactionary world, straightness is not presumed amongst kinky women. Bi is, like, the default.

And you find obviously straight kinky women are practically apologising for their bad sportswomanship and trying to have girl crushes if they possibly can.

And it’s even worse if you’re poly too. The poly default is that it is about the woman in the obligatory couple exploring her bisectshuality. Hence the eternal quest for the hot bi babe to make the triangle complete. But you don’t have to be a bi woman to be a poly woman. It can just be about getting more dick.

Honestly, even before I saw that thing in the Guardian (which I know truly wasn’t actually about that it just sounded like it) I was already pre-enraged by a BBC3 show called Dawn Goes Lesbian. It was about a straight woman (who had had an F/M/F 3some once) having a go at being a lesbian. Just tell me how this wasn’t offensive to everyone ever.

It was a car crash. Horrid viewing watching this woman try and be something she wasn’t because the received wisdom was that not being up for getting it on with girls was just not cool

The show really did include Dawn explaining that she might was well try because women are ‘more fluid’. That’s not even true. If there is a sex who is notorious for getting into same sex action when in prison or the army or some such it’s men. It’s men who do that.

But forget that. No one lets male/male sex into the sexual mainstream because that’s not what straight men are comfortable looking at. Compulsory bisexuality for women, on the other hand, is very convenient for those same men. It means for example that they don’t need to apologise for every sexualised image ever being of a woman. Because, what you don’t like it? You want pictures of naked men? Stop flaunting your hetness you homophobe?

Wrong. Actually it’s the swathes of f/f porn that is homophobic. It’s about men not having to look at other men when they are feeling turned on. Or in kink it’s often also about misogyny. It’s about submissive men hating both themselves and women so much they prefer to equate the way they feel and the ways they want to be treated with femininity.

It’s why kink dot com think it’s fine to suddenly throw a submissive woman into femdom/mansub site Men in Pain or a dom woman into mandom/femsub Sex and Submission. Because no straight women are going to be thrown by that are they? No straight women watch kink dot com. Because kinky women are bisexual. So a submissive bi woman watching Sex and Submission will be fine with a female dom and a dominant bi woman watching Men in Pain will be fine with a femsub.

They wouldn’t dream though, of showing male submission on Sex and Submission ‘cause the poor mandoms would get the willies - or a mandom on Men in Pain for the same reason.

If there is one rule in porn, it’s this, don’t upset the male viewers. Almost every question you have about why porn does X or Y or never shows hot men can be explained by remembering that this is the rule.

Keeping in mind that women’s sexuality is totally malleable and fluid helps with this rule – which often involves not giving any consideration to women wanting anything specific sexually ever. Want to know why het porn doesn’t court women more? ‘Cause it can’t work out how to do that without upsetting it’s main - and uber fragile, apparently - consumer base.

Women don’t have specific desires. It doesn’t really matter what you ask them to do. Just tell them they look pretty and run them a bath after.

Hence the swathes of kinky men who expect any woman who is open to kink to indulge whatever pathetic fetish he feels like boring them to death with. Hence the prodoms who list on their websites every possible off-road sexual activity and no one (except me) thinks it weird that they should be into, like, everything. Hence the idea that any woman can be confused into being a dom because women are naturally superior/not vanilla/whatever fits today. (Because no woman would already have her own sexuality sorted out and maybe be vanilla or submissive or into something you’ve never thought of)
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Female sexuality is what it is. It might change. It might not. But nothing makes me sicker in kink that the idea that if a man is kinky the woman has some kind of duty to accommodate that. Why is it in stealth submission that the idea that the woman will embrace being dominant eventually is considered okay and a good thing whereas the idea that the man might change or deny his kink is unthinkable.

Why is his kinkiness more important to his identity than her lack of kinkiness?

I’m not fluid. I know who I am and what I want. I tried being gay once. And honestly now I think that was just because het kink was just so repulsive to me. But - unfortunately for me - het kink is where I fit. And often, when I see all the kinky bi-women saying as how women smell good ‘cetera, I often wonder if they too are just so repulsed by what is presented to them as the world of het kink that they’ve chosen the same hopeful exit I did.

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