Thread by @ElizSimins

kiss

https://twitter.com/redditships/status/1076190737270747137

ok but joking aside,

kiss

i know the main take on this is "aw men don't know how to express platonic affection, that's so sad" but have you considered: men are so afraid of being gay that they don't consider they might have romantic feelings for their sweet "bro" who gave them *looks at notes* jewelry

"elizabeth are you really saying everyone's gay" if "i think heterosexuality is assumed to be the default for humans based purely on socialization and therefore all 'straight' people should do a lot more questioning because it's super likely they aren't actually 'straight'" means

that "everyone is gay" then like... yeah? i guess?

basically i think that when one sexual orientation option is so overwhelmingly encouraged by society and others are overwhelmingly discouraged, we all need to wonder if we actually want to kiss our "bros"

because if we did want to kiss our bros, it's likely that we wouldn't know it, because society would be telling us not to

"but straight people exist i'm one of them"

ARE YOU THOUGH??? can you know that the thing you've been brainwashed to be is also what you Really Are?

think of it this way: there are people who have been raised in religions, and say "even if i hadn't been raised to be X, i would be"

and many/most of us are like... that's definitely not true, or at least vanishingly unlikely

we are ALL brainwashed to be straight!

"but people evolved to be heterosexual" that's just not true! non-heterosexual behavior has been around for as long as humans have, and our modern conceptions of heterosexuality have only existed for <200 years or so, since "homo-" and "heterosexuality" were coined to mean—

"abnormal" and "normal," respectively

there's never actually been any scientific proof that heterosexuality is the default for humans; we just assume it to be true, and keep trying to find out what "causes" homosexuality as if that is a sensical question to ask

(i highly recommend reading chapter 3 of "Straight" by Hanne Blank for more background on the ridiculousness of trying to find the scientific "cause" of queerness while assuming that non-queerness doesn't need to be "proven")

anyway once you're able to realize that you've been brainwashed to be heterosexual (seriously what about society DOESN'T tell us to want to be straight), you'll be more able to live authentically and accept the possibility of romance with your sweet friend who gave you jewelry

imo people who identify as queer is just a portion of actually queer people, mostly people who were TOO QUEER to fit into society's demands not to be queer. but imagine if society didn't tell us from birth that what will truly make us happy is getting heterosexually married?

logically without that constant reinforcement of heterosexuality in literally every area of our lives (family, media, advertisements, religion, etc etc etc) there would just... be a lot fewer people whose goal in life was to fall in heterosexual love

so in conclusion, yes i believe that everyone is gay

if you decide you want to interpret what i said as that, i'm fine with it

addendum: "but elizabeth, you're Gay, you're a big ol lesbian, are you saying that only queer sexuality is real and only heterosexuality is fake??"

ah a complicated question! which i will now attempt to answer

when i was in high school, i had a gay teacher who took issue with the term "sexual preference" (he preferred "sexual orientation") because, as he said, "if you're gay/straight/bi isn't the same as if you like chocolate or vanilla ice cream"

BUT LET'S UNPACK THAT

make fun of me all you want, i have never liked chocolate ice cream. idk why, i'm not a huge fan of dark chocolate, and besides chocolate ice cream always tastes to me like something all its own, not quite proper chocolate, in any case i have literally never liked it

fortunately for me, society isn't arranged around forcing people who don't like chocolate ice cream to eat it. but if it were, if people who didn't like chocolate ice cream were forced to eat it regardless, if violence were committed against non-chocolate-ice-cream-likers,

then nobody would be arguing that one's queerness was any different from one's ice cream flavor preference. because we don't actually choose what we LIKE, in any arena of our lives. everyone knows that, because everyone has tried really hard to like smthg bad a friend recommended

sometimes we have irreparable differences in what we like! for example, my girlfriend dislikes Neo Yokio, which i view as an extremely bad opinion. but she can't help that she doesn't like Neo Yokio! and i can't help that i do

some preferences are way subtler: like, i pretty reliably dislike whiskey, but i LOVE a good whiskey sour. i used to hate IPAs, but now I love them (is it because they've been so trendy for the past few years that i've gotten used to them? maybe! i can't rule that out)

similarly, when i was a kid, i was attracted to girls and boys, but i suppressed the part of me that was attracted to girls, and hid it until i was an adult. now, i'm only attracted to women. why? i prefer them, just like i prefer vanilla ice cream, it's just a part of who i am

i think that the main difference between "i only want to be the romantic/sexual partner of a woman" and "i've never liked chocolate ice cream" or "I used to hate IPAs but now I love them but i can't drink them too often bc they make me sicker now that I'm 30+" is oppression

i'm not saying that food preferences are more important than sexual orientation, because they aren't, but that's only (imo) because of how society has been arranged to venerate one particular sexual orientation and violently denigrate the rest of them

so to go back to the original question: if heterosexuality as we know it is a construct, if most heteros would do well to ask themselves if they're REALLY hetero, does that mean queer sexuality is also a construct?

& the answer is: yes, but we live in a heteronormative society

like yeah i think humanity is basically what we would currently call "bisexual" or "pansexual"—just like humanity is basically agnostic when it comes to ice cream flavors

but when certain preferences are disproportionately oppressed, people who express them get to be (more) Real

and yeah i'm gonna spend time/energy asking "straight" people to question their sexuality... bc as someone who was (like everyone) brainwashed to be straight, and then realized after many agonizing years that i wasn't, i know the benefit of opening yourself up to that possibility

ok i'll stop tweeting about this now ✌️

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i'm glad people are reading this thread because 1. i feel very strongly about the issues therein and 2. i'm hoping that at least a few people are going to turn gay because of it