Barbelith Underground > Policy & Help > Barbelith: 'pro-queer', 'anti-hetero' and community

To a great extent I agree with Haus' first post in this thread in that barbelith isn't an anti-hetero community and yet I find that as this goes on I find a certain reserve in my own response to some of the other points made.

I have a great deal of respect for Mr Disco but I think the early response to his second post here is one that I can't really accept. Simply because someone expresses opinion in a different way that you wouldn't ordinarily encounter does not make that opinion any more reasonable in the context of a discussion about fetish and attraction.

How can we criticise straight people for having a social reaction to certain things? Fetishisation (I apologise if I am not using this term correctly- should it be fetishising?) often stems from a social reaction, if it's partly gender based then that should be defined, if it hasn't been defined enough then elaboration should be requested but to indicate that as a generalisation is probably not the best way to tackle the response to society that is imbedded within it. To request a deeper analysis is to get within the society itself. I suspect that would have been the better response. Clearly a lot of the people who posted and specified female in one way or another were referencing the wider perception of women. The very act of steering away from gender is to ignore the existence of it and clearly it is deeply effecting, a construction and something that infringes on everyone's personal lives and thus the way that they experience the body and the way that people use their bodies. To not fetishise the body in a gender-specific way is often impossible because of the pressure applied during developmental stages of our lives. I am interested in whether bisexuals find that they have the same responses to people no matter their gender or if they in fact find different things attractive.

That few people were reluctant to talk about their own fetishing of the male body is as much a sign of the constraints on women who are attracted to men as the men who were prepared to indirectly indicate the commodification of the female appearance in the original thread started by GGM. Were I to say I find broad shoulders attractive in a man it would fit into a stereotype- albeit a female one- it would not necessarily map on to women. I might find small shoulders attractive in a woman. It would be very based on social constructs however stating that would not address it because it would remain a socially based commodification of gendered bodies that was inescapable.

This is all precarious because we cannot expect people to ignore the element of otherness in their own attraction and if that is partly represented by a person being of the opposite sex then that is an important feature. Mr Disco's first post in that thread, the question don't any of you straight-boys-who-must-constantly-declare-your-straightness find some attributes sexy in anyone? is striking because the answer might very well be a no and that may be why the word woman was bandied around. I suspect that Oluabelle's reaction was actually based on that. Do people find things sexy outside the societal construction of gender? Attraction is something that is difficult to get to the heart of because it's not particularly telling. It can tell a story about an individual, it can tell a story about society, it doesn't primarily link those two things together though it may hint at it. Fetish is often about power, not necessarily power over women, some of those posts clearly suggested that it was the power of the other that was being fetishised. That's deeply personal and deeply psychoanalytic and it requires some care in addressing.