Reactions to the False Accusation

I spent last night really thinking about how my friends and I reacted to T's accusation of sexual assault. I was incredibly fortunate that R HAD been there the entire time, and that pretty much everyone knew how sexually timid I was at the time. I was all for exploration, but rarely, if ever, instigated because I was convinced after years of school bullying that I was the fattest, ugliest, most vile piece of trash out there, but that's beside the point.

When this happened, both R and S laughed it off like it was no big thing.

I was stunned, and utterly destroyed.

I want to break down these reactions.

R was a gay man. S was an incredibly butch lesbian. Both of them were used to being viewed as sexual predators by the majority of people they interacted with. I mean, everyone knows gay men spend all their time cruising bathrooms and trying to molest young boys, right? And butch lesbians all want to force themselves on straight girls. So, to both of them the idea of being accused of being sexually predatory was pretty common place stuff. I'm not saying it didn't hurt, but they'd already acquired the hard crusty veneer you get after years of catching crap like that.

I, however, had lived my life ostensibly as a heterosexual girl/woman to this point. I wasn't used to anyone viewing me as a sexual threat to themselves. At all. The closest to that sort of thing I ever got was the girls who viewed me as a threat to their boyfriend's fidelity. But once I came out vocally as bisexual, something I had known about myself since I was roughly five, suddenly women I had been friends with for years were afraid to be alone with me. My behavior hadn't changed, behavior that had been completely fine when they thought I had no interest in them (and for the most part I still didn't), but once I let them know the possibility existed, some of them freaked the fuck out.

In reacting to their reactions, and particularly after T's freak out, I started to withdraw from all of my straight female friends, at least physically. If the things I was doing were scary, then I would stop doing scary things. I quit hugging them, quit touching them, folding tags under necklines, getting their attention by touching their arms, the myriad ways in which straight women physically interact with each other every day. All of it.

THEN they demanded to know why I had gotten so distant. Why didn't I hug them anymore? Why didn't we all sit crowded on benches together anymore? Weren't we still friends?

Gah, I think back to that time and it gives me a headache. I was fortunate to have R and S, who had both gone through it much earlier, and while at the time I often got mad at them for trivializing what I was going through, I needed them to help me see that I hadn't changed, just the way other people perceived me. They had both dealt with it.

It was weird. I went from being completely harmless as far as most people, particularly women, were concerned, to being "the Predator in Their Midst!!!" All by merely voicing the concept of a more fluid than normal sexuality. It's an illustration of the loss of protection that happens when you step outside of the standard roles in which our society casts you: Suddenly women fear you, and for straight men, well you become even more of a target, probably by virtue of the fact that you don't "need" them and therefore threaten them. I don't know. Maybe they're afraid that you'll convince other women that they don't need them either.

It's incredibly frightening and isolating, this "othering" that takes place when you deviate.

Hopefully this is articulate enough to make sense.

Things I didn't quite feel fit in the last post.

Coming out as bisexual was both more anticlimactic and difficult than I had thought it would be.

Basically, I was talking to my friend P (who later dated R), and he said, "Please don't hate me, but I have to tell someone. I think I'm bi." He had cut school to come pick me up at my school to have someone he could talk to about it.

I stared at him for a minute, and then it clicked in my head what he'd said.

"You know, I think I might be, too!" Then we both laughed and hugged, and I think possibly kissed.

I had never had a name for it up until then, really. I'd known since I was five that I frequently had crushes on other girls, and wanted to kiss them like I did with boys. But I also learned very quickly that my liking girls was not ok, and something to be hidden. I think it was after getting caught kissing my best friend in kindergarten. When P came out to me, I realized I wasn't the only one who liked both genders, and it was a relief.* Bear in mind this was AFTER I had fooled around sexually with a friend of mine back in Ohio. But we weren't gay or bi, we were drunk, and that made it ok. Don't get me started on how fucking wrong this is, and how fucking wrong I KNOW it is NOW. But yeah... 16 years old, in my second high school in as many years, terrified that other people will figure out the deep dark secret...

After coming out to my high school friends, and the to do with T, I went through a lot of the stuff that Nice Guys (tm) and MRAs are constantly on about. I dealt with the girls who viewed me as a predator waiting to pounce on them constantly. I also dealt with (and still do to some extent) the girls who were curious and saw me as a safe way to experiment sexually. I dealt with the first girl I fell in love with stringing me along to get what she wanted out of me, while telling people tales about how I frightened her and she didn't understand why I kept following her. Yet every time I tried to leave her alone, like the guys she would cry to demanded, she would chase me down and convince me it wasn't true, she would never say those things... I dealt with many (straight, bi and gay) women who thought they could lead me around by the cunt as easily as they led men around by their dicks.

The thing is, I, and several million men (other bi women and lesbians as well), manage to go through these travails and think not "All women are deceitful, manipulative cunts," but rather, "What the hell am I DOING that keeps attracting these nutballs to me? Have I unwittingly put a great big 'Use me, I like it' sign on my forehead?"

And yeah, I had. It took several years of very understanding friends and therapy, but I did sort it out. The fact of the matter was that I attracted deceitful, manipulative dicks as well as cunts, because I was really easy to manipulate. And to some extent I kind of still am. Less so as I get older and wiser in the ways of manipulative assholes of both genders, but I still have my moments where I get snookered by someone with a good sob story and an excellent poker face.

And I'm still catnip for bicurious women who want to experiment. I'm not sure how much of the "I KNOW you'll be good and gentle" stuff is bullshit or real, nor am I sure it's just that they know that since I have Ogre, I'm not likely to get embarassingly attached to them. Or how much of it is, I'm just one hot sexy bitch capable of turning your wives and girlfriends, so be on notice, bitchez...


*I'm convinced that part of the process of becoming an adult is the repeated realization that you are not the only person X has happened to, and that keeping that shit a secret is BAD. Values of X differ with the life lived.