Sexuality and societal standards

Sexuality and societal standards

Written by Morgan Barela

For most of my life, I thought I was straight. Well, sort of. The doubt had always been there. In the back of my mind existed my reality; I like women too. But it was an idea I never entertained.

There were moments throughout my life that stood out so starkly as an indication of my sexuality. My celebrity crushes growing up were Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. I chalked up the latter to believing I wanted to look and be just like her, not that I was actually attracted to her.

I’d often say: “If I were a boy, I’d have a crush on her.” And then there was the time when I was 12 and I asked my best friend if she also had girl “crushes”, you know, the kind of “crush” you get where you definitely don’t actually have a crush on the girl, but you might like her if you could like girls.

The uneasiness on my friend’s face as she vehemently disagreed was enough to make sure I never asked that question to anyone else ever again.

For so long, I simply ignored what was so evident. It never occurred to me that I was bisexual, because I never gave it the time to occur.

So as I got a bit older, and more and more friends around me started coming out, I began to understand myself a bit more. It was conversations with my friends in the LGBTQ+ community that led me to figure out who I was, and I owe it to each of them for the way that they guided me through this world of uncertainty.

But the realization that I could have been suppressing my sexuality this entire time didn’t make sense. I was always so accepting of everyone around me, so I couldn’t understand why I had such a hard time coming to terms with my own identity.

Growing up LGBTQ+ isn’t easy, for so many reasons. And then there’s the misconception that your sexuality is something you always figure out early on. That you just know.

I grappled with immense uncertainty around my sexuality. I’ve found that so much of it ties back to being a woman. As women, we are often made to believe that our sole aspiration is in receiving male validation. Society has deemed attraction to anything other than masculinity a threat to femininity. Our attraction to men, and their attraction back to us, is an unfortunate measurement of our value as a woman.

When I learned about compulsory heterosexuality, everything made sense. Compulsory heterosexuality is the theory that people, regardless of their true attraction, can confidently believe that they are straight, due to the way that society enforces heterosexuality as the “default.”

I grew up with the cliche princess gets saved by the prince trope. All the movies, nearly every fairytale involved the princess falling helplessly in love with the prince. As a bisexual woman, this is very much still in the realm of possibility for me. But a lack of representation is far more damaging than some may realize; it leaves LGBTQ+ people to figure themselves out alone. With the way that womanhood is so often defined by romantic relationships with men, it’s no wonder why I struggled to come to terms with my attraction to other genders for so long. Heterosexuality was the expectation.

Heteronormative standards create an overwhelming battleground for Queer people. While LGBTQ+ representation grows little by little, progress is halted by the way that heteronormativity continually seeps through society. When the ‘default’ is heterosexuality, being anything other than straight can feel confusing.

Heteronormativity tasks Queer people with the obligation of having to explain themselves. Being bisexual, my dating history is seen as a spectacle for others to figure out. I’m often met with inappropriate questions. Clear boundaries are crossed by people who “just want to understand it better”. There is doubt and skepticism, rooted deeply in biphobia. Not to mention the stereotypes that bisexual people are prone to infidelity or promiscuity. Ultimately, I often find myself having to justify my own sexuality, and having to defend it as if being testified against.

More and more people are identifying themselves as bisexual. In my conversations with other bisexual people who figured it out in early adulthood, I often find we share a similar experience: It was obvious our entire lives, but somehow we never noticed until one random day as an adult and now life makes so much more sense.

What initially felt like a journey I was embarking on entirely on my own turned out to be one that so many people of all sexualities and identities have lived through too.