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    Homophobia: The fear that another man will treat you like you treat women.

    fathappyandcaffeinated:

    aatombomb:

    We were discussing homosexuality because of an allusion to it in the book we were reading, and several boys made comments such as, “That’s disgusting.” We got into the debate and eventually a boy admitted that he was terrified/disgusted when he was once sharing a taxi and the other male passenger made a pass at him.

    The lightbulb went off. “Oh,” I said. “I get it. See, you are afraid, because for the first time in your life you have found yourself a victim of unwanted sexual advances by someone who has the physical ability to use force against you.” The boy nodded and shuddered visibly.

    “But,” I continued. “As a woman, you learn to live with that from the time you are fourteen, and it never stops. We live with that fear every day of our lives. Every man walking through the parking garage the same time you are is either just a harmless stranger or a potential rapist. Every time.”

    The girls in the room nodded, agreeing. The boys seemed genuinely shocked. 

    “So think about that the next time you hit on a girl. Maybe, like you in the taxi, she doesn’t actually want you to.”

    (Source: andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com, via lilytangerine)

     

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    (Source: letters-and-sodas, via lilytangerine)

     

  4. (Source: letters-and-sodas, via lilytangerine)

     

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  9. Continued… But I feel like I need to make the case that this is not true for everyone. Not every woman who is in an intimate relationship with another woman wishes she were a man. I don’t feel like I was born the wrong sex, I don’t believe I live as the wrong gender and I don’t wish to become something other than I already am. I do enjoy, however, everything there is about being a woman. To me, being with another woman only amplifies all the qualities I love about who I am. I’m in a caring, respectful relationship in which we both find each other beautiful and attractive not only physically but internally as well. Of course I still feel the instinctual desire to “mate” but nothing compares to having an intimacy in which you share not only clothes(hehe) but so many of the same qualities, views and experiences. Back to the original statement, if you want to call it a “lesbian relationship” then by all means, go ahead. I do not feel the need to define myself as such because all I am is a person loving another person for who they are and what I enjoy about it is that we do both enjoy being with each other all the time.

     

  10. A friend recently said something to me that not only took me aback but struck me as very profound for several reasons, mostly because it defined my current relationship in only several words and gave me the insight to see it for what I’ve always known it to be but couldn’t quite define until that moment. As an innocent joke, forgetting I have a girlfriend, she bluntly said “I wish we were in a lesbian relationship so we could be together all the time”. As I sat on the receiving end of that statement I couldn’t help but feel confused and angry because secretly, I did, at one point, want to be more than the close friends we were and hoped one day she would say that to me and mean it. I didn’t understand though why after putting so much effort into clearly making a point to define herself as heterosexual, she would think it funny to make a comment like this, jokingly or not. It just made me feel as though as wistfully as she had said it that there was some truth behind it. My point is, it brought me to think of my relationship with my girlfriend and made me realize, I had the relationship I wanted and with someone who wanted it just as much as I did. I feel like there is a stigma for women who choose to be in relationships with other women, mainly that they have to fit into a certain stereotype for people to make sense of why they are together(I.e. being “butch” because then society can say a woman really wants to be a man and therefore must have masculine qualities and desires and therefore justifies her being intimate with another woman.)

    A friend recently said something to me that not only took me aback but struck me as very profound for several reasons, mostly because it defined my current relationship in only several words and gave me the insight to see it for what I’ve always known it to be but couldn’t quite define until that moment. As an innocent joke, forgetting I have a girlfriend, she bluntly said “I wish we were in a lesbian relationship so we could be together all the time”. As I sat on the receiving end of that statement I couldn’t help but feel confused and angry because secretly, I did, at one point, want to be more than the close friends we were and hoped one day she would say that to me and mean it. I didn’t understand though why after putting so much effort into clearly making a point to define herself as heterosexual, she would think it funny to make a comment like this, jokingly or not. It just made me feel as though as wistfully as she had said it that there was some truth behind it. My point is, it brought me to think of my relationship with my girlfriend and made me realize, I had the relationship I wanted and with someone who wanted it just as much as I did. I feel like there is a stigma for women who choose to be in relationships with other women, mainly that they have to fit into a certain stereotype for people to make sense of why they are together(I.e. being “butch” because then society can say a woman really wants to be a man and therefore must have masculine qualities and desires and therefore justifies her being intimate with another woman.)