“Choice”
There’s a lot of buzz about “choices”. About women who “choose” to have abortions, about women who “choose” to be straight or lesbian, about women who “choose” to shave or not shave their legs. About poor people who “choose” to be lazy and not work.
There’s some deeper philosophical divide going on here. Are we all free agents moved by nothing more than our personal will? If so, then everything bad that happens to everyone, outside of accidents or direct harm caused to a person by someone clearly more powerful than them in every way (let’s go with a neutral example of someone safely crossing a road in a crosswalk with a walk light on who gets run down by someone in a truck – clearly individual free will plays no part in the victim’s role there), all of those things are at least in part your fault.
Going by this theory, outside of being brutally raped, every woman has a total and complete choice to sleep with men or women as she so desires according to her personal inclination and political consciousness.
The other side of the theory is that we are all somehow products of society and free will is an illusion. That we will act according to how we are raised and what is around us, influencing us.
The “truth”, I think, is somewhere in between.
I had a “choice” to have an abortion when I was 21. Of course if I had made the “choice” not to have an abortion I would have been instantly relegated to the lowest ranks of poverty, the “father” having said in no uncertain terms that he would fight paying child support every step of the way and would have nothing to do with me or the baby, and not having any familial support since my family is a mostly a big group of insane abusers. Of course, laws relaxing the strictures on abortion made my choice much easier than it would have been if I lived somewhere where I had to find some illegal, possibly untrained or dirty doctor elsewhere, where I would have had to fear for my life and health if I got one. Possibly the certain spectre of loneliness and poverty might have seemed more appealing then. But I had a “choice” to have an abortion (and thus continue on with my life) or to have a baby (which would have pretty much ruined any chance I had to do anything.) Even at the time I was so horribly angry at having it so glibly passed off as a “choice”, as though I were choosing whether to wear a green or a yellow shirt that day.
As far as a choice to be lesbian goes – i.e., a choice to not sexually interact with men that one consciously makes before one becomes sexually active at all – I literally never had that choice, unless you are going to somehow argue a 40 pound child has the choice to say no to an adult male. But the near ubiquity of the sexual abuse of girls aside, I am not going to deny that heterosexual privilege exists. What I will say is that it is difficult to impossible for most women to give it up, just as a matter of philosophy or politics, at such a young age as to never have gotten involved with a man at all. I can’t speak for everyone here, I don’t know what makes some women able to ALWAYS say no to men. What I know from my perspective is this:
When I was young the word lesbian was never spoken around me. I never saw a lesbian, never saw two women kiss. I literally did not even know such things existed. I was in my mid teens before that was even presented to me as a concept. Yes I was raised very religiously, but in spite of living in America in the 70’s and 80’s, there is still such invisibility visited upon lesbians that it was not hard at all for my family to shield me from all knowledge of such things. In spite of this, I was having lesbian longings and feelings that I didn’t even begin to comprehend – but yes everyone and everything around me demanded, expected, assumed I would grow up, marry and have children – every book, every movie, every woman I know did so. Without exception. In the meantime the men in my family were sexually abusive to me and all the other girls. By the time I was an adult, let there be no doubt about how ground down into the dirt I was, how unwilling I was to step out of line, fear, shame, and submission having been literally beaten into me. I don’t pretend I’m exceptional or alone in this. And the fact is, you cannot look at any woman and know if that has happened to her.
For me, coming out as bisexual almost as soon as I moved away from home *was* a radical act. Stepping out of the tracks I’d been steered into was terrifying, even if it was for something some radical lesbian feminists roll their eyes at. I still at that time did not meet any lesbians or see any examples of lesbian culture. I did not until I was married with a child, in my 20s. The idea that I had a “choice” to leave my husband and take my son to go live with strangers for social/political reasons then would have been completely unthinkable, even if I had had the money to buy a single greyhound ticket to travel several hundred miles to the only lesbian space I’d ever heard of – and then they may have not wanted my son there, as some such places do not.
Do I have a “choice” to eschew all contact with males, abandon my son, and live a life henceforth free of males? Sure I do. Is it a realistic choice? Was it a realistic choice to expect me to make as a traumatized, impoverished 18 year old? If you, reader, suffered for your choice to come out as lesbian when you were very young, and I could not find the opportunity or the will to do so because of various mental, social, physical factors, does that make you better than me? More pure? Have I made “bad choices”? Maybe, but I can say every step of the way I always made the choices that seemed most logical to me for survival. Not “privilege”, not a pretty house and a boyfriend who made me popular and had a lot of money, because I’ve never had that. Much of my life has been a struggle to survive by any means necessary. My choices, and my options, have not been pretty. On paper I look like a total fuck up as a result. I have no college education, a spotty work history, no trade skills, a mental health history, no familial back up, and my health isn’t the best. Often in my life my sexual/romantic partners have been the ONLY people on my side in any way. Even when they have been outright abusive and I knew it I had no where to go that I could see.
Maybe I should have tried harder, suffered even deeper poverty and more abuse by others and steadfastly refused to sleep with men at all. I could have been homeless most of my adult life then, instead of only for a year or so. Would that make me more ideologically pure?
Yes some heterosexual and bisexual women seek to use lesbians as play toys in their het relationships, as evidenced in personal ads everywhere. Personally though I think personal ads are the absolute worst place to find any kind of relationship at all. Seriously – have you ever met one single person who’s found love or even a long term relationship that was in any way healthy through a personal ad?! I only ever read them to laugh at them. Try to sum up what will knock your socks off in 100 words or less and it all comes out sounding trite.
*rant rant rant*
