The Lavender Pill

Harper Forsythe (they/them)

As we push back against gender roles, the patriarchy has found its last stand in policing sexuality across the board. Lesbians are either derogatorily mannish, or barely squeezed into acceptance through aestheticised gender conformity. Men are either cruel, or vivacious gay best friends.

This understanding of men has created a standard in which their sexualities are debatable when they express kindness, which is obviously too weak a trait to belong to anyone but a woman or gay man. However, when we express that heterosexual men are inherently violent and cruel individuals, we don’t challenge the structures that make it seem so. Rather, we borderline allow this conduct by dismissing it as an inherent trait of manhood; boys will be boys. But positioning male violence as nature doesn’t challenge patriarchy, it presents the subjugation of women as the natural backdrop against which we are obligated to live our lives

‘All the good ones are always gay’ furthers the notion that femininity is kind, loving, and of little substance beyond service of greater masculine forms. This understanding does not buffer the tangible impact of patriarchy on those who aren’t men, nor does it criticise it. When men promote misogyny whilst deviating from the caricatured angry man in a wifebeater, we drag our feet to criticise them. It is sickening to see queerness consistently boxed into the binary to support understandings that negate intersectionality.

This box rears its tokenistic head in the gay best friend, or GBF, whose queerness is a source of exoticism and deviance that heterosexual society would prefer to display from a distance or pocket. Queerness is entertainment and for ownership. Straight women both see gay men as the only safe men to befriend, whilst reducing them to the ‘fun’ parts of queer culture and othering the community.

Friendship between a man and a woman, impossible as it seems, is considered a powder keg of sexual chemistry. When it fizzles, the woman is ‘leading him on.’ This is not an occupational hazard of friendships forged between straight women and queer men – an extension of the non threatening nature of atypical masculinity.

This culture of pick-pocketing queer identity through a GBF does not apply to lesbians. Our blanket exclusion from consumable queerness follows our divorce from normative womanhood, wherein attraction to men is built in. For women to exist without being attracted to men is an inherent act of gender deviance. This masculinises lesbians, making us a threat to docile womanhood, and pushes the idea that we are predatory; waiting in bushes with undercuts and pocket knives on our carabiners to steer good women away from men.

This is reflected in the way we consider the word lesbian dirty. Female celebrities lauded as queer martyrs for their candour regarding their attraction to women almost exclusively avoid the term. The word’s dirtiness is only exacerbated by the rampant misogyny of the porn industry, presenting us as deviant objects for male titillation first and people, second.

Where we aren’t sexualised, we are entirely removed from our queer desire. The idea that all lesbains succumb to a cottagecore aesthetic, and are waifish, sexless, white women who bake together and rarely kiss is ridiculous. We are expected to distance ourselves from the bad butches, and instead exert our femininity through this exclusionary model, lest we be further masculinised by the gender deviation that queerness represents.

I hear countless jokes about being annoyed with men, or ‘getting the ick,’ which are inciting incidents for shaving your head, attaching a carabiner to your belt loops, and swallowing the lavender pill. Except, that doesn’t happen. Straight women sit in the comfort of their heterosexuality whilst othering lesbians through a false praise of how easy we have it. After all, men are inherently violent and we were smart enough to evade it. To these women, lesbianism is a costume to try on when you want to outgrow your attraction to men. Lesbianism is queer, deviant behaviour you indulge in on weekends, only to throw away for normalcy when it’s no longer the quirky, counter-culturalist thrill you seek.

When you comment about how much easier we have it because women are simply much kinder than men, you perpetuate the conflation between womanhood and passivity; giving way for views of manhood as violent. This violence is then acknowledged as an inherent trait of masculinity. A trait we sidestep and thwart through lesbianism, and not a trait that is the manifestation of patriarchy.

You now enjoy escapist fantasies of docile lesbians where you box us according to our feminine daintiness rather than the porn category we are so often relegated to, slapping the title of progress over the repackaging of gendered oppression and homophobia.

But the gender binary has never served us and erasing our history with your virtue-based sexuality certainly won’t. Queerness isn’t a campy costume you wear to a Drag Race watch party and it’s not lesbians lining up to surrender our carabiners to straight women ‘getting the ick.’ Our politics and history propel us as we move forward and going forward means going against the oppressive gender binary.