If Your Article Can Be Summed Up As No, You Shouldn't Be Writing It

CW: repeated use of the Q-slur by someone who can't reclaim it
Yeah, so, I found another one. And I don't know why straight people insist on writing these ridiculous articles about being single or polyamorous and how they're supposedly oppressed for it, but they piss me off so I intend to dissect every single one just to tell them how utterly insipid they all are.


It's called "Is There Something Odd About Being Single?"

"I had wanted to cut off all my hair and drive across the country, alone, in celebration of my singlehood — not because being single was new to me, but because it was, I had decided, O.K. Better than O.K., if a single person lived as I would: at large, roaming, free....Naturally, I started seeing someone a few weeks before I was set to leave. Then I chickened out and didn’t cut my hair all the way."

I can relate, actually. So much of the pressure on me to be feminine, including in the way I cut and style my hair, is not only about looking like a cis woman, but also to be attractive to straight men and to be with straight men. Whenever I'm attracted to a man, I find myself accidentally acting more feminine because, from childhood, that was what I always saw women doing with men in the media. Disney Princesses. The female leads on my favorite sitcoms. The heroines of the books I read. And it was so uncomfortable - it made me feel like I was in the body of a stranger. A lot of this has to do with me being bi, but there's no reason it wouldn't also affect cishet women - which I can only assume Helen Rubinstein is, because she's dating a man and the only claim she apparently has to being LGBT is that she feels uncomfortable around man/woman romance - she doesn't mention being trans or nonbinary in this article and she doesn't mention being bi.

"At the campground, a young couple frightened me by virtue of being the only other people around. They had tethered their barking dog to a stake and hung a set of prayer flags from the open trunk of their S.U.V., but now they were packing up — silently at first, and then with hard, fighting words."

Obviously they would frighten her. They startled her, they're strangers, and she's a woman alone in the middle of nowhere with a phone that doesn't work. That's not a fun situation to be in, especially when - judging by her name - she's ethnically Jewish. But being startled doesn't make you LGBT. I don't really care how "queer" she felt by being alone or how marginalized she is in ways other than homophobia and transphobia - someone needs to wash her mouth out with soap or some shit so she never says that fucking slur again.

"They could see me as clearly as I saw them, though, and when I looked at myself through their eyes, I saw a person who couldn’t possibly be having a good time."

Maybe because she wasn't. She was scared and had just been cut off from a conversation with a good friend. That's not really a recipe for a fun day. Also, truthfully, this couple probably didn't really care much about some random woman camping in the woods. Helen is not a mind reader. She didn't know what they actually thought of her because they did nothing to indicate it.

Even if they actually did assume she wasn't having a good time because she didn't have her boyfriend with her, that probably has more to do with misogyny than anything. When, after all, do people assume that straight men aren't having a good time because they don't have their girlfriends with them? Especially since men are so proud of spending time away from women, complain about how their girlfriends nag and irritate them for no reason, and refer to their wives as their 'ball and chain'. Or, you know, it could have just been a normal observation of theirs - nothing can be truly completely separated from politics, but not everything is inherently political or oppressive either. Sometimes human interaction is just neutral.

"The request accommodated varying sexualities but left the possibility of singlehood unacknowledged."

She's talking about a work meeting here, where everyone attending had been asked to talk about their partners and interests. But even though that kind of request vaguely leaves open the possibility that not everyone is straight, talking about your partner publicly to someone you don't know is always treacherous territory for gay and bi people in same-gender relationships.

When we were talking about marriage and relationships in my anthropology class a few weeks ago, we were asked if we were dating anyone and whether we were looking for marriage. I said yes to the first question and no to the second. The teacher asked why I wasn't looking for marriage if I was dating someone. I was about to answer but then stopped, realizing how vulnerable my answer could make me to this group of predominantly cishet people who I had no reason to trust.

The reason was that at the time, I had been dating a woman. It was my first time doing so, even though women have shown interest in me several times before and since, and I was acutely aware of how people might react if I talked about her. Finally, I phrased the question in a way that sounded straight enough. "I'm dating someone, but we just started seeing each other. It's way too soon to think about marriage."

I have never had to stop and think about how people might react if I told them I was single. Even if they speculated about my sexuality because of that and my appearance, telling someone I don't have a boyfriend - even, at twenty years old, that I've never had a boyfriend - had never been as difficult or scary for me as the few times when I had to tell people that I had a girlfriend - even if that wasn't totally accurate, because I broke up with her before we ever got to the point where I would have called her my girlfriend (personally, I would wait at least a month before referring to someone as my boyfriend or girlfriend or datemate). But whatever. She was a woman. We dated. I don't think most homophobes really care as much about what we called each other as they do about the fact that we were two women who were mutually attracted to each other and doing things together that they would say we are going to hell for.

"'I’m single and I like long bike rides,' I finally declared, wondering if these strangers pitied me or if they saw my singlehood as the sign of something unpleasant and uncooperative."

Again, this is misogyny and it affects women of all sexualities - even straight women who are dating but not looking for marriage. I remember talking about one of my favorite female teachers to my family. My grandpa called her "Mrs." and I corrected him with "Ms." because even though she was living with her boyfriend, neither of them wanted to get married. He looked annoyed and irritated at these younger women - even though she was well into middle age - who didn't settle down and start popping out kids by the time they reached 25, the way women were expected to when he was young and the way women are still often expected to today.

Any rebellion against that narrative of cis heterosexuality, getting married young, performing acceptable gender roles and feminine sexual purity, and having kids is frowned upon for women. But that doesn't mean that nuns are LGBT, or women who work while their husbands stay home with the kids, or single moms, or women who propose to their husbands.

There's also the fact that singlehood is usually something temporary. Helen Rubinstein eventually got into a relationship. I'm single right now, but looking for a relationship. My mom was single after my dad died. Most people are single for awhile when a relationship ends. It's not a permanent state of being that materially affects your privileges throughout your life, the way that being bi or a woman or disabled or nonbinary are permanent states of being for me.

"Later, when new friends in that town effused about having me over for dinner but failed to follow through, I felt queer again. I suspected they felt awkward inviting me when everyone else would arrive in twos."

Really. She's queer because she got left out. Because she got flack for something that someone else didn't, not because there's actual structural violence against her purely for being single.

I honestly think people like Helen Rubinstein assume that oppression just means that people are mean to you.

"When I heard of an acquaintance who, running for local office, worried that her singlehood made her untrustworthy in voters’ eyes, I could empathize. There was something queer about being single: queer in the sense of 'strange,' yes, but also in the sense that connotes a threat to the conventions around which most people arrange their lives."

Again. That's called misogyny. A single straight man would never encounter this kind of obstacle.

"'I’m so old to be single and so young to be divorced,' she said. 'What will people think?' Her husband had been abusive and she knew she would be better off, but she still feared that something was wrong with her for not making the relationship work."

Misogyny and abuse culture. There is so much pressure on women of all sexualities to make relationships with men work at any cost and none at all on the cishet men they date. This even extends to the point that people defend abusive men at women's expense and blame the women for not 'making it work' even if making it work means putting your mind and body in danger and constantly sacrificing everything of yourself for men's approval.

"The shame of having 'failed' at marriage isn’t unlike the 'failure' of being single, if you consider the congratulations offered newlyweds the sign of a universal goal achieved."

Misogyny. All of this is just misogyny, abuse culture, and people being shitty but not oppressive.

"Mine was a shame I only recently had begun to inspect. How much of the feeling arose from my own desire to couple up, and how much from the sense that, by not doing so, I was confounding family and friends? How much came from the suspicion that, when colleagues asked whether my new apartment was spacious enough, they were actually wondering if I lived alone — but found the prospect too tragic to name?"

[Image description: that scene from SpongeBob Squarepants where Mr. Krabs is playing a sad song on the world's smallest violin]

Yeah. I'm so sure they found being a single straight person just as tragic and confounding as a bi or gay person in a same-gender relationship. Very queer.

(/sarcasm in case anyone couldn't tell.)

"And when I viewed singlehood as akin to queerness, I felt grateful for the queer community’s reminder that convention shouldn’t dictate how relationships are defined. The opposite of shame, of course, is pride."

One, we're not "the queer community." We're LGBT.

Two, none of that is for you, straightie. It's for us, to combat internal and external homophobia.

"'When I was a young person coming out, it was like I signed up for this crazy, marginal life,' a lesbian in her 50s once told me. She is married now and rarely feels queer. Her sexuality hasn’t changed, but her life had mainstreamed."

Mainstreamed?! Since when is it widely considered mainstream for two women to get married?!

"The history and the present of queer people’s marginalization are far more severe, but the strides they have taken toward having their lives recognized are proportionally as vast. Meanwhile, queer or not, single people are treated with a mild exclusion and a bafflement that feels centuries past."

Singlism: the new homophobia, apparently. Except that it doesn't actually need to be combatted because it doesn't fucking exist.

"How could I not, when even a Supreme Court justice would declare, in a decision that ruled all bans on same-sex unions unconstitutional, that to be unmarried was to be 'condemned to live in loneliness'?"

The straightie is offended by a speech supporting gay marriage. How quaint.

"Another friend reminds me that to reclaim singlehood the way queer people once reclaimed 'queer' is a means of seizing power."

Oh yeah, I'm so sure that every LGBT person with trauma around the q-slur would agree. I'll consider that next time I see my single relatives and remember that their disgust around the idea of attending my wedding or meeting my girlfriend or even acknowledging the possibility of me having a girlfriend has nothing to do with homophobia - they're just poor oppressed cishets who don't want relationships shoved in their faces. How dare I question their revolutionary, queer singleness.