#from someone who's not like actively trying to be horrifically lesbophobic

[doedipus]

Guilty gear fandom misogyny is so incredibly frustrating

Like you can pick any boy out of the roster and the entire fanbase is probably falling over themselves to hype them up; people pop off for their associated players' gameplay, they construct elaborate fan media that brings out the intricacies of the characters and shows off their best points, and won't take no for an answer if someone claims to not find them maddeningly attractive

But then with the girls, at best nobody cares about them besides the dedicated superfans, and at worst literally every other player only speaks the character's name to complain. They'll get nothing but vapid pinup fanart with no regard for character, if they're even on the radar at all. Whenever one of the female characters gets a buff or a player makes a good tournament run, everyone stops what they're doing to complain for a month, until they go back to largely ignoring them again. And then whenever a patch brings a new boy people convince themselves is cool, or gives an existing one significant buffs, half the players on a female character drop her to switch. It's like clockwork.

Also for some reason every male character has people headcanoning them as trans in both directions, regardless of anything about their actual characterization, but none of the not-canonically-transfem girls really get that kind of fan attention, which is disappointing. Except that one artist who thinks elphelt should be transmasc.

I think the only guilty gear girl to escape this is Bridget, by dint of being a little sweetie pie. But she's still like a purely auxiliary character to the canon, so there's not a ton to talk about besides decade old discourse, and she's underdeveloped at a top level, with the only notable reps being players who use her to try and scam opponents out of a few games before switching to their real mains once they drop one themselves. Like despite her popularity among casual fans there's still no daru for Bridget

And honorable mention to season 2 baiken, who attracted a lot of upper level players who were unsatisfied with their mains at the time, who then nearly unanimously dropped her for John or sin in S3 when it became apparent that it wasn't as easy to win with her as they initially thought

[shotfromguns]

I’ve been seeing some Fresh Shitty Takes over the past day or two revivifying my “butch/femme is exclusive to lesbians for Reasons (TM)” Discourse Headache. Some of them were articulated by folks whose writing in other areas I’ve very much appreciated and respected.

All of these posts—all of them—are at their hearts inescapably biphobic.

To be clear, when I talk about “biphobia,” I am making use of a shorthand for describing a set of experiences specific to bisexual people—in this case bisexual women—that grows out of the interaction of actual forms of systemic oppression like homophobia and misogyny. (Cf. lesbophobia, which describes the experiences that grow out of these oppressive systems that are specific to lesbian women.) There is no coherent “monosexual” class, there is no such thing as “monosexual privilege,” and anyone using this post as a springboard to claim that there is will have their lesbophobic/homophobic ass blocked as soon as I see them.

Long shit under the cut...

I’m not going to bother to touch on the individual inconsistencies (e.g., “these terms don’t mean anything anymore... but somehow simultaneously it’s important to me that bi women not touch them!”). I’m just going to highlight a few of the most egregiously biphobic assumptions that lay at the heart of the worldview that butch/femme dynamics are exclusively the purview of lesbians.

1. Butch/femme labels/identities/presentations/paradigms are for women navigating relationships with other women.

When this is your argument, what you are saying is, “Bi women do not need to navigate relationships with other wlw,” and, “I will never need to navigate a relationship with a bi woman.”

Like, if you’re a lesbian who just categorically nixes bi women as an option? Fine, your prerogative. But please just own your biphobia so we can avoid each other honestly instead of trying to couch it in The Discourse to frame yourself as the wounded party here.

2. Bi women are trying to appropriate lesbian experiences.

What lesbian experiences, exactly? Pursuing women? Being pursued by women? Fucking women? Being fucked by women? Dating women? Loving and being loved by women? These are wlw experiences; not lesbian-exclusive ones.

We can AND SHOULD talk about whether it's appropriate for, e.g., “femme” bi women in monogamous m/f relationships to continue to describe themselves in terms built around wlw relationships when they’re neither pursuing nor open to being pursued by other women. But that’s... not remotely representative of all bi women? It doesn’t describe me (masc-of-center, dating another masc-of-center woman, both of us bi, neither of us interested in actively pursuing men), and it doesn’t describe the vast majority of bi women I personally know, either.

The fact that the “butch/femme is lesbian-exclusive” side of this debate continually and continuously holds up that particular example to the exclusion of any other conception of how bi women exist—which fucking all of you do—boils down to a categorical assertion that bi women are a bunch of effectively hetero pseudo-queers claiming marginalization so we can cash in on that Hot Hot Gay Cachet while performing traditional femininity, fucking men, and enjoying what amounts to straight privilege with a rainbow flag draped on top. I hope it’s self-evident why that’s... inappropriate.

3. Butch/femme labels were developed by lesbians, for lesbians.

These labels were developed by wlw, for wlw. Many (probably most) of them at the time referred to themselves as lesbian. But the ways we view ourselves and talk about ourselves have changed over time, and wlw communities have always included women attracted to other genders as well.

There are exactly two scenarios where a wlw community doesn’t include women whose experiences map onto what we today call “bisexual”: (1) it’s, in the fine radfem tradition of last century, deliberately excluding us for being crypto-heteros and traitors to our gender for admitting any attraction to men; or (2) we’re there, but calling ourselves something other than bisexual.

Absolutely, we can’t and shouldn’t remap old sexual identities onto modern terms. Which is exactly why someone can’t claim that “lesbian” 30, 40, 50 years ago is the same thing as “lesbian” today. We need to look at the historical communities of wlw and recognize that they were just as diverse as they are now, even as those experiences were mapped onto different conceptions of how to exist as a wlw—which means that it’s equally inappropriate (a) for current bi women to claim that all historical “lesbians” who also had relationships with men would ID as bisexual today and (b) for current lesbian women to claim all historical “lesbians” would ID as lesbian today.

It’s ridiculous for either bisexual or lesbian women to erase the lives and identities of earlier generations of wlw (or older living wlw) because of some compulsion to cram the past into the new Balkanized model that grew up through the late 20th century. (Side note: It could just be Tumblr demographics in action, but I am not at all surprised that most of the people I see being vocal about this are no older than their mid 20s.) The only way it makes sense to say that “lesbians” created butch/femme for “lesbians” so it should only be used by “lesbians” is if you literally warp yourself back in time to that moment, set up a time loop, and live in it forever, so that “lesbian” will mean exactly what it did in that moment and continue to do so. You can’t map what it means to be a lesbian in 2017 onto what it meant to be a lesbian in 1967; or, rather, when you do so, you have to recognize that it’s not a 1:1 match, and you need to make space for those 1967 lesbians whose experiences were not yours and stop trying to claim the ones that aren’t purely by virtue of having inherited the same word that’s since gone through an evolution. We need to look at the wlw who helped build the culture we have now—whatever words they used to describe themselves—and recognize that ALL OF US OWN IT, AND ALL OF US ARE EQUALLY INVESTED IN IT. The fact that some bisexuals have straight-passing privileges some of the time does not invalidate that all wlw are oppressed by homophobia—even if we experience that marginalization in different ways and to different degrees at different points in our lives. Being invisible is safer than being hypervisible, but it is not the same thing as being privileged—and, again, many bi women are exactly as visible as and have no more passing privileges than lesbian women do.

4. Butch/femme labels/identities/presentations/paradigms belong to women who aren’t attracted to men.

This is what it really all comes down to: the misogynistic, homophobic idea that the single most important, most deeply defining aspect of bisexual women is that we [have fucked men] and/or [may theoretically in the future fuck men].

This drips with the insidious, misogynistic, biphobic framing of bi women as being "available to men." Yes, absolutely, it's vital to talk about the ways in which lesbians being categorically unavailable to men leads to unique experiences of misogyny and homophobia for them. But to take that important consideration and flip it around the other way is so, so dangerous—this is not a parallel, reversible idea.

Bisexual women are incredibly disproportionately victims of sexual violence and intimate partner violence. This 2010 report from the CDC, for example, paints a pretty horrific picture:

Bisexual women had significantly higher lifetime prevalence of rape and sexual violence other than rape by any perpetrator when compared to both lesbian and heterosexual women.

Bisexual women had significantly higher lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner when compared to both lesbian and heterosexual women.

Exactly why bisexual women are so disproportionately abused is a complex issue with a lot of potential interwoven causes, but it’s absolutely undeniable that stereotypes like, oh, say, being “available” to men are a serious contributing factor. This is deeply gross language rooted in patriarchal bullshit. Bi women are not “available to men.” We are some of us attracted to some individual men in addition to women. That’s all it means.

There is literally no categorical conclusion to be drawn about how we interact with other women on this basis.

I recognize that it’s important for lesbian women to be able to articulate their identities and experiences as lesbians specifically (just as it is important for bi women to be able to articulate our identities and experiences as bisexuals specifically), outside of our broader shared experiences as wlw.

The problem with staking out butch/femme as exclusively lesbian is that there is nothing either in the history of butch/femme or in their modern meanings that reasonably restricts their usage to a smaller circle than all wlw who are involved with and/or pursuing other wlw—so the only way to do so is by artificially, biphobically excluding bi women from a shared set of experiences.

If anybody thinks they have a genuinely unique and non-biphobic contribution to make, I’m all for it. But at this point, having seen nothing but the same tired excuses to throw bisexuals under the bus like that’s in any way going to help lesbians assert a unique lesbian identity, I’m really, really doubtful.