#and on reddit even cis men were like yeah you were a fucking asshole

[dragoncarrion]

My favorite type of AITA posts are ones where the op is very crearly being a piece of shit and the comments are just flaming them to hell and back

[janeaustentextposts]

In almost every period romance that has been written in the 21 century, couples have a sexual relationship very similar to the ones we have. Is that historically accurate? Did some couples have healthy sexual relationship that wasn't just the woman laying back thinking about England while her husband did all the work?

[cw: mention of rape]

I covered a little bit of something similar to this in my post about sexual education of the times, but basically…yeah. There’s absolutely no reason to suppose that Georgian and Regency couples weren’t having plenty of fun in the sack. Or the library. Or the stables. You get my point.

Georgians were delightfully, unabashedly bawdy. Yes, Fanny Hill was banned and from a modern perspective is a cavalcade of yikes yikes yikes in several respects; but when I say banned I mean just officially, and there was a slew of unregulated printings that got people access to forbidden and spicy texts. Plays had riotously sexual jokes, and even genteel ladies could get away with performing songs with rather saucy and sexualized lyrics (particularly if the ballad-singer is in-character as a Scotswoman or other ‘foreigner’.)

Of course there were dreadful intersections of ignorance and patriarchy to make things awful for many people, sexually-speaking. Marital rape was not legally acknowledged in the UK until 1991, and not explicitly made illegal until 2003. A 1736 treatise by former Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale posited “the husband of a woman cannot himself be guilty of an actual rape upon his wife, on account of the matrimonial consent which she has given, and which she cannot retract,” and this view was upheld in John Frederick Archbold’s 1822 Pleading and Evidence in Criminal Cases, which to this day is a leading text in criminal law–so this would have been the common stance of many people in terms of determining ultimate right or wrong, though no doubt anyone with a heart would allow that brutality towards one’s wife was at least unseemly…but then this is all behind closed doors, and even today there are large swathes of the population who have sex they don’t actually want because they feel that’s safer than pushing back against expectations, and would balk at calling such a thing rape, even if it is, by its simplest definition. If people struggle and resist the idea that they may have been raped by their partner in the present-day (and I get it! It’s a devastating concept to grapple with in the midst of what is already a painful and confusing and fragile circumstance! When an assault is non-violent, then acknowledging it as assault can start to feel like it’s something you chose or made happen, and that’s a mindfuck I’m still coming to terms with more than fifteen years after I was assaulted by someone I considered a friend--and let me tell you right now what my therapist told me...nothing you said or did then or now made it what it was: their choice and their actions did;) then how much harder must it have been for people who knew there was no legal remedy, even for the most brutal of intimate assaults? (And it’s not like legal remedy is more than a pipe dream for most victims, today. Fuck this broken system and the sickening culture that built it.)

Outside of heterosexual marriages, things could also be horrible. Raids on molly-houses and capital punishments handed out to cis men caught in homosexual relationships were ongoing in Regency London, and cases of divorce and adultery dragged through the courts became horrifying sensations, a-la Lady Worsley, so there were no doubt plenty of situations where people were oppressed or exploited and otherwise denied a healthy exploration and expression of their own preferred sexuality without condemnation.

But in terms of everyday people who avoided getting caught up in frightening public exposure? I can only suppose that their hearts were as tender as ours and their anatomies as wondrously made in all the variance we know, today, and I fully believe that healthy and satisfying sexual encounters between all sorts of couples (and throuples, and more open relationships where marriages were not always for love or monogamy,) were not uncommon.

The relaxation around modern sexuality in progressive cultures hasn’t stopped fuckboys of all genders and sexualities from being fuckboys, so while the proliferation of inclusive attitudes/language, understandings of consent, birth-control, and the effective treatment and prevention of STIs has made it easier to breathe and safer to bone as our libidos would like, history certainly didn’t have the market cornered on assholes; but for the rest of us, good sex is the sex we want to be having with ourselves and each other, and it’s always been in everyone’s best interest to aim for that.

And from a lot of what I’ve seen on reddit, there are still plenty of people who don’t get what a clitoris is for in the year of our Lord 2019, including people who have a clitoris, so we’re not out of the woods yet for making sure nobody ever has to think about England again.

(Unless England really gets your motor running, in which case, have at it.)

[hypomanicsatanicpanic]

saw a 15 year old lesbian comment on reddit that “most” lesbians realize they are gay earlier than 15....  LOL. 

For what it’s worth, I really hope that most gay and bi femmes are realizing who they are attracted to earlier than I did: hopefully, the prevailing culture is less toxic/homophobic/biphobic, there are more accessible resources to learn about diverse sexuality, there’s more representation in the media. 

But I also think a lot of us "older" folx ended up repressing/ not recognizing our attraction to women until somewhat later in life than 15. 

I didn't actually realize that until I was attracted to women until 23/24. I was just starting to question a bit at 20, but I wasn’t sure about it until a few years after that. I’ve only ever had sex with one woman, one time. A majority of my life past the age of consent (which was 16 in my state) has been spent in a monogamous sexual relationship of some sort with a cis-het man- and being the Type of Person who is in that kind of relationship really enforced this sense of being A Straight Type of Person. That, along with a whole truckload of internalized biphobia (You’re not a Real Bi if you’ve never been in a relationship with a woman! You’re not a Real Bi, because Bi Women Do Not Exist- you’re Clearly A Poser Who Gets The Attention Of Men By Pretending To Be Interested In Women, Even If You’ve Told Zero People You’re Interested In Women! You’re Obviously Going Through A Phase. You Can’t Be A Bi Woman While Being In A Relationship With a Cis Het Guy). I still struggle with that sometimes, being in an open/ poly relationship with a cis guy is different, and I’m dating women and NB folx, but the persistent, shitty, biphobic question is still there, bouncing around- can you actually be a real WLW if you have any ongoing sexual or romantic relationship with a man?

I think part of the reason it took so long for me to figure out what attractions I have was that there was no WLW frame of reference for the first ~18 years of my life. In high school, there were no "out" lesbians, bi people, NBs, or transpeople; only one very flamboyant gay dude (who was bullied by pretty much everyone), and one very not-flamboyant but not closeted gay teacher (who was bullied by the administration, by students, and by homophobic parents). There was certainly no sex ed to speak of (yeah, we did sit in a room while we were shown drawings of reproductive organs, and told that condoms were not 100% effective and that the pill was risky and that having sex would definitely make you Teen Pregnant).  Being bi or gay was so far out of the parameters of possible Things You Could Be presented to my peer group that I literally didn’t recognize feelings of attraction when I had them...which in turn led to a whole lot of unfulfilling and shitty sexual experiences later on. It’s like when you consistently are forced to eat more food after you are full- you lose touch with your appetite, and that fucks up your eating habits.  

Even people in cis-het relationships were not really much help in explaining attraction. The straight girls I knew were dating people because they thought they were a "cute couple" or because there was social pressure to do so- nobody openly talked about attraction or sexual feelings they were having beyond- "He's soooooo cuuuuute!" or “he’s got GREAT eyes!” or “He’s sooooo hot!”. Nobody talked about what cute or hot actually meant, it was just assumed you’d know what that meant, because you thought so too. I actually thought that the reason I never agreed that boys were cute is because I just didn't find the right one that I was attracted to-- that the people my friends were into were not my type, not that the men who are “my type” are very much more an exception to a rule that excludes most men than a rule to which there are exceptions. I regret that I was never confident enough to tell the girls who’d make that kind of comment that I didn’t get it.  At least in my experience, teenage gay and bi femmes really didn't have any kind of open existence in the early 2000s and 1990s, especially not in the conservative place I grew up. I suspect this is also true of the rest of the US--If you think of Mean Girls as an (exaggerated) portrait of what was going on in high schools at the time, you can clearly see why being a big-L Lesbian like Janis (who also fulfilled nearly every goth/art-kid/non-conforming asshole stereotype) was not something that a lot of young people in my community (pretty affluent, very academic and preppy, pretty rural, a lot of South- and East Asian -immigrants) could relate to. There was no real sex ed, definitely not sex ed that even mentioned lesbians (!), or sex that was done for reasons other than procreation.  Actually, the Mean Girls representation of sex ed was pretty spot-on.

 Also, Janis's character didn't go very far to actually talk about her attraction to women, or what that was, or how she experienced it... there were just rumors flying around that she was lesbian, which everyone seemed to think of as a bad thing, for reasons that were never explained. I don’t think I saw another representation of lesbians in the movies (and can’t recall any in books, with the possible exception of Tamora Pierce books, where I think it was subtle enough I mostly didn’t pick up on representation that did exist). Sure, I conceptually knew that Ellen was a lesbian, but had no idea what the fuck that actually meant, other than that she was Different, and in the abstract Liked Women. I don’t think I saw a picture of her holding hands or hugging Portia until I was 20 or so. 

 Anyway, in my circle of (mid-to-late-twentysomething) friends we joke that L/B femmes goes through delayed adolescence because everyone is still trying to figure out how to talk to women and ask people out on dates into their mid-20s. Or, you know, they’re already married.   Not sure how to end this post, but  1) representation is REALLY important in children and YA works as well as in adult works 2) bi femmes exist, and shouldn’t have to prove shit to anyone 3) queer discourse is fucking important.  4) a lot of us are late bloomers, and that’s ok. sometimes it’s not safe to bloom early.  5) hopefully not everyone in the future will have to be a late bloomer  6) inclusive sex ed is important  7) lots of love for my fellow midwestern queers