Labels, Tribes and the Beauty of Singularities.

I cannot write you. I try and fail. I try, I fail and I’m a butcher.

Me

I’ve had some ongoing conversations, and I’ve offended some people recently, because I’ve refused the label ‘bisexual’. I want to take the opportunity to explain why and to acknowledge that for some people these words matter greatly, and why I’m wary of this.

The Advocate.Com has an OpEd: Aversion to the Big Bad B Word Continues, which goes on to discuss how people identify themselves and whether they have the right to identify themselves in certain ways. What I came away with from that article was that historically, once marginalized groups of people gain a power base, they usually start acting a lot like the dominant one, determining who can identify as part of the group and why.

The first time I ever encountered this was with my paternal grandmother, a Sephardic Jew whose family could trace its roots back in England to the 16th Century. There is no other way to put it – she was antisemitic. She felt that Ashkenazi Jews (newcomers, in her eyes) were inferior to her. I’ve had similar experiences when meeting Japanese who felt that Japanese of Korean origin weren’t really Japanese, and a few First Nations people who were obsessed about what percentage of the tribe’s blood you had to have running through your veins in order to identify yourself as a member. Of course, this doesn’t happen in isolation. When, during the Middle Ages, the Jews in Europe were almost universally reviled, you could probably turn up in the Jewish quarter of any city, and say ‘Hello, I’m a Jew,’ and no one was going to argue with you. Being a Jew was nothing but a risk. Who in their right mind would claim affiliation unless they had to? Similarly, I suspect a man turning up in an illegal gay club in the Victorian era was not grilled about his past sexual behaviour in order to be admitted.

I guess, in a way, it’s a positive sign, a sign of the sense of empowerment and establishment within the greater society that any group grows to be picky and choosy about who it will admit into the fold, and yet… the woman in the article who is in love with a man but still wants to be identified as in a lesbian relationship, instead of bisexual… Why isn’t the world happy to let her call herself whatever she likes. And more to the point, why does she feel such a pressing need to call herself anything at all. She’s a human, who loves a human. She has someone to love, who loves her. Isn’t that marvelous?

I am not a lesbian, or bi, or hetero. I am attracted to certain human beings, and the tackle they were born with plays no part at all in my attraction. Neither does their past sexual practices. Neither does the gender they identify with. If there is a configuration on the planet, I’ve probably been attracted to someone who had it.

Someone suggested I call myself pan-sexual, and I guess that probably comes as close as anything to describing my orientation. But it’s not accurate. It’s not the ‘pan’ I have a problem with. It’s the ‘sexual.’ I have been deeply, erotically in love with people with whom I’ve never had sex, and never will.

I bet some of you are thinking: well, then that doesn’t count! Who are you to decide for me under what circumstances I’m allowed to claim a proclivity? When I’m allowed to publicly consider a relationship an erotic one? And why the overwhelming need to chunk me, and push me into the membership of one tribe or another? I’m me. My name is Madeleine, and I reject your generalization of me.

I understand that lots of people feel safer in a group. That there is a sense of companionship and empowerment in identifying with a tribe. I don’t deny you that right. I just don’t feel the need for it myself.

I didn’t always feel that way. When I was much younger, I did at one time feel very strongly the need to identify with a group. Then, when I jumped through the hoops and got admitted, and the brief elation of feeling included passed, I realized I was amongst people who spent a good proportion of their time and energy keeping people out. That’s the day I decided that I didn’t want or need a tribe. That I would always be a loner, and that I was willing to run the risk of getting caught out alone on the savanna to stay that way.

It’s exactly the same with my kinks. I don’t feel like I’ve suddenly come home in a roomful of submissives or Sadists. My personal sexual proclivities are very complex, and  – and this is more important – highly dependent on the person I’m indulging in eroticism with. I do tend to prefer people with non-normative sexual tastes. I tend to be attracted to certain outward signs of dominance and perversion and an interest in transgression – in persons of any gender, or who identified as having none and any sexual orientation. I don’t identify myself as a submissive or a masochist. What am I if I suffer through a caning from you? What am I when I straddle your back, wrap my arm around your neck and sink my teeth into your shoulder? And no, I’m not a switch. I am me in the moment. with you in the moment. And the few people who labeled me as either of those things, and made assumptions based on them… were sorely disappointed. Let us say that erotically, with me, if you make assumptions, you’re not in a safe place.

The pain in the ass for you is that this means I am forcing you to see me in the particular, or not at all. If I refuse a label, how will you identify me? How will you reduce me to some easily filed away category? Maybe you will get to know me for who I am. Maybe you will decided it’s too complicated to bother with. I find this one of the best strategies of all for forming relationships that are lasting. Forcing people into a place where they must deal with me on a singular level.

The truth is, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t enjoy and glory in the complexity of people, the infinite variations of them, admire the beauty of all that data, and revel in meeting someone as a singularity, I probably don’t want to know you anyway.

Finally, as a writer, I was always trained to keep the hell away from generalities. That it was lazy shorthand. And I have tried, as far as my capabilities allowed to translate my love of singularity into my writing. I seldom use labels of sexual orientation unless it is important and germane to the story. I avoid using kink terms like the plague. Using them inevitably stops me from having to describe the desire, the act, the response. And for me, erotic writing is all about seeing the delicious singularity in any erotic act. One whipping is not like another. Or, if it is, it has become a tired game, and not a moment of bliss. I cannot avoid genders – our language, as some incredible philosophers have pointed out, IS gendered. But I hope that I write my characters well enough that a reader might identify with them, regardless of whether their gender or their genitals corresponded. There are times, in my imagination, I have a cock. I am any gender, any configuration, any orientation I need to be to indulge in and enjoy the story. I think there are readers like me.