So, here's the thing: I tend to identify as straight because I am in a long-term relationship with a man, I've primarily been attracted to men, I've never been in a long-term relationship with a woman, and thus I get all the privileges of heterosexuality. I've fooled around with other girls, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and I've had a queer poly relationship with two men, and I strongly believe that my sexuality is dynamic—and that deviation from a static sexuality at a fixed point on a spectrum makes me queer by most straight standards, but doesn't always make me queer by most queer standards.
So I'm a straight-queer sorta gal. But labels are not what this post is about. It's about the fluidity of sexuality, and how the ladies of The View don't dig variability, man.
[Transcript below.]
Where to begin? Well, although Behar is certainly the voice of reason compared to Hasselbeck's nonsense, I don't particularly love the idea that women who come out as lesbians late in life were necessarily closeted all along. I'm sure that's true for many women, but why is it so hard to conceive of a woman (or a man, for that matter) whose attractions, or choices, change over hir lifetime?
We're always so desperate to talk about sexuality as if it isn't a choice, ever, for anyone, lest we create a crack into which homobigots can insert their argument that it's an American-wrecking lifestyle choice that makes the Baby Jesus cry buttplug-shaped tears or whatever, but, you know, maybe we should be talking about sexuality in a way that says even if it is a choice, people who love and fuck and live with and parent with and grow old with or have one-night stands with people of the same sex are deserving of equal rights because it's no one else's goddamned business and MREWYB.
Personally, I'd like to create space for the women who choose to be lesbians later in life, instead of telling tales about how they just "didn't know" they were lesbians until they woke up one morning with a voracious appetite for cooter, or whatever magical awakening they're meant to have had.
And let us not fail to mention how this entire either-or conversation the View ladies are having totally erases the existence of bisexual women.
I'm not even going to bother deconstructing the foolishness emanating from Hasselbeck's garbage-brain. Suffice it to say I do not agree that late-life lesbianism is primarily attributable to sexless spinsters who are just looking for passionless companionship and fall into the arms of the nearest accommodating lesbian because all the good men are occupied applying copious amounts of Just for Men to their temples and chasing co-eds. Yawn.
[Via.]
Whoopi Goldberg: There is a rise…in late-blooming lesbians. More and more women are choosing same-sex partners, even after decades of heterosexuality. Why do you think that is?
Sherri Shepherd: Is that saying as women get older, it's just like a 'been-there-done-that' kind of thing, and I'm open to—
Elizabeth Hasselbeck: No—no, and I'll tell you what's happening: All the older men are going for younger women, leaving the women with no one!
Joy Behar: So that's why they're suddenly sleeping with women? That's ridiculous.
[a bunch of stupid crosstalk]
Behar: You act like women are in jail—we're not in jail! I—
Hasselbeck: No, but you're searching for a companion that understands you, and if all the men who— Say you were in a heterosexual relationships; you're looking for that, but the men who are of your age, have had similar experience, are off chasing a little young—
Behar: Yeah, but, Elizabeth, being a lesbian, being gay is not just, you know, holding hands and walking through the tulips.
Hasselbeck: I understand that, but—
Behar: There are things that people do, sexually—
[crosstalk]
Hasselbeck: Thank you for educating me! [sarcastically]
Behar: Wait a minute; I'm not finished. But I don't think that you suddenly wake up and say, "You know, I think I wanna do that." You wanted to do it; you were just trapped in a system that said "Get married."
Shepherd: So you're saying all along—
Hasselbeck: Maybe, maybe not!
Behar: All along you knew you were gay, and you just didn't either admit it or you didn't acknowledge it or you didn't know it, maybe—
[crosstalk]
Hasselbeck: —but maybe there's also— We've done studies that women aren't necessarily needing something sexual; they're more needing something in terms of—
Shepherd: Companionship.
Hasselbeck: —companionship, at a certain age.
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