Definitions

I remember as a kid being called a lesbian or gay was considered an insult. If a boy held another boy’s hand they were gay; showing affection for the same sex was just something you weren’t supposed to do. Adrienne Rich wrote the article “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” because she wanted to challenge the way society erases lesbian existence and how society tries to make women conform to the hetero lifestyle. I never thought of being a heterosexual female was a privilege before I went to a brown bag a few weeks ago that discussed what’s it like to have to come out and what’s it like to go through the prejudices society enforces in people. Reading this article made me realize that people had to literally hide their identities so they won’t be harassed and so it won’t affect their job status, so it won’t affect their lives. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have to hide who you are because other people can’t handle it.

One idea from this article was that straight men were the dominating force keeping lesbians oppressed. Men denied women of their sexuality with clitoridectomies, forced male sexuality on them through forms of rape, incest, and beating of wives. Men control abortion rights, marriage, and the idea that motherhood is not a job. Men confine the movements of women, tying them down and trapping their escape. Men treat women as objects to buy and sell at their leisure or to use for their own sexual gratification. This article talks about the fear men have of women being indifferent to them, which is why they force themselves on women. It’s a crazy concept to actually see how little women’s emotional and physical state matter to men. Women don’t need a man to go about this world and survive but a man would be lost without a woman by his side. Men need women to tend to their needs and fantasies.

This fear of a woman preferring another woman over a man made men burn and torture these lesbians. Men performed deliberate genocide on unmarried women and lesbians were sent to treatment camps to get “help”.

We’re in the twenty first century and yet the idea of being a part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community isn’t as widely accepted as it should be. Human beings shouldn’t have to live in fear of being who they are. Human beings shouldn’t be harassed because they are different from another person. Nobody should have the right to tell another person how to feel, defining who they are.

 

 

Nobody has the right to define you.

 

-Tatiana F.