like. okay.
I went to a halloween party on friday, hosted by a coworker of mine. she and her housemates are in their last year of university, so a lot of their other friends were all uni-aged (ie like 22 and under), but a few of us from work are a bit older than that. I think another coworker V and I, at 31 and almost-31, were probably the oldest people there.
another friend, a former coworker we’ll call A, was also in attendance. A is 23, was raised Mormon (though she no longer practices that faith specifically and her values are much more progressive now), and recently finally extricated herself from a four-year abusive relationship after believing for a long time that she was gonna marry this guy. probably due to the breakup, she allowed herself to get fully drunk, which she almost never does, and… well.
for reference, A and I are fairly close at this point, and I apparently remind her a lot of one of her older sisters, so she has absolutely zero difficulty being very open with me. this was only exacerbated by her drinking.
early in the evening, she made the comment to several of us that “if I were a man or a lesbian, I’d be fuuuucked. there are so many baddies here.” later she came to me and confessed (rather entertainingly) that she was worried she’d been “misleading a gay person” bc this girl was flirting with her and A worried that in their banter she maybe hadn’t been clear enough that she was straight. (I later learned that the girl in question is bi and flirts heavy with anyone and everyone when she’s having fun, and definitely wasn’t taking their conversation seriously lol. I did watch her flirt with several other people later in the night.)
later in the evening I walked into a completely separate conversation, which A wasn’t even a part of, involving both some of my coworkers and people we didn’t previously know. this conversation was mostly girls and they were talking about whether they’d ever kissed another girl. some giggled and admitted they had; others were lamenting ‘ugh, I wish, but me and my friends were never the kind of girls who kissed each other!’ …which. is a whole other can of worms. later this topic was briefly revisited when several people from this group were chatting with A again, and she made a similar comment about 'oh I WISH I could, but I’m straight…!’
if you’re wondering: yes, I plan to look for an opportunity to talk to A gently about this, sometime when she’s sober and it’s not a large party setting, lol. I think there might be some things there she needs to consider, based on a few different things she said and just my knowledge of her in general. she’s young and freshly over a Dickhead Long-Term Ex and maybe needs to do some self-reflection? I’m not gonna push it but I certainly want to encourage her to check in with herself on some of this stuff.
but even aside from just her. I keep thinking about the Have You Ever Been With A Girl discussion and everything it really starkly pointed out to me in the moment. when you have a heavily queer and sex-positive friend group, it’s easy to forget there are lots of people out there who are very socially progressive but haven’t had the space (or the encouragement) to figure out their own proclivities.
the girls in that discussion that I knew from work are all very cool people. they’re comfortable with and vocally supportive of their queer friends and peers. they have what you and I would consider pretty solid morals. I know some of them have been to pro-palestine protests, some have lamented with me over the state of politics in our region, some have stood with me in defense of a trans colleague when a department manager deadnamed her. they’re all people I like spending time around and would describe as good, open-minded, liberally-inclined human beings.
but apparently many of them have never experimented with their sexualities even insofar as sincerely flirting with or kissing a girl. it’s okay if that’s not something you feel comfortable doing personally - I don’t like to do those kinds of things unless I have a sincere interest in the person - but they should feel like it’s allowed. so many young people never try these things because they’re comfortable enough in Straightness not to bother. sexual experimentation - including both the senses of exploring one’s orientation, and of just exploring interpersonal intimacy in general - is, even in broadly liberal settings, considered to be reserved for people who are actively uncomfortable engaging with the dominant ways of existing as sexual beings.
you can try kissing girls if you know you hate kissing boys. you can try kissing girls if you’ve always known you wanted to. or maybe you can try kissing girls if you’re the ~wild and adventurous~ kind of straight girl who’s comfortable breaking the rules that way (and I genuinely think this last one is more a myth than a real kind of person). lots of Comfortably Straight girls, seeing that they don’t fall into those first two categories, figure they’ll only get their chance if they happen to stumble into that third person and get persuaded to try it.
it never occurs to them that they’re allowed to try it just for the sake of the experience. that even if they really are entirely straight, there’s no inherent harm in kissing another girl just because.
broadly speaking, curiosity and experimentation are rewarded in a lot of ways, in typical western/north american society. intellectual curiosity is a good thing that leads to new discoveries and ideas. curiosity about other cultures, about other ways of life, even about unfamiliar kinds of food, is considered to make you a better-rounded person. experimenting with your fashion sense until you find something that really makes you feel good is widely agreed to be a great way of finding and expressing your most genuine self.
but sexual experimentation and the fear of straying from the Safe Path of Heteronormativity make it so that so many people never learn much about their own sexual and romantic desires, or even realize that that’s an option they have.
