Lesbian coworker: The straight women I know talk about the men in their lives with resentment. It’s as if they pity them. Why would you want to live like that?

I do not mean to equate “gay and lesbian” with “enlightened”, because that is both stereotypical and false. But those who fall outside the acceptable boundaries for sexual preference and gender tend to be a slightly more openminded bunch. They’ve been asked a lot of questions, some even with merit, and they’ve asked themselves many more. Sometimes they go on to question things that have nothing to do with being queer, or transgender, or butch — like relationship structures, or sexual taboos — about which straight people, who’ve never needed to question the Sex In The City model, haven’t even dreamed.

It’s true, I thought. Sometimes you get a roomful of straight women together and you can’t hear yourself think for the pained, slightly hysterical laughter at their partners’ expense. Straight men, you see, are Neanderthals: stupid, dirty, inadequate excuses for human beings. They leave socks on the floor, load the dishwasher wrong, consider frozen chicken nuggets to be fine dining, and vaccuum around the furniture. Their uncontrollable sex drives are just embarrassing: they hide their filthy pornography under the mattress, come home from strip clubs reeking of cheap perfume.

The men talk about the women with resentment, too, I thought. Perhaps they don’t pity them; they look down on them. They view their feminine rituals as a bewildering and deceptive trouble, and yet they set value by attractiveness. They want a homemaker and mother, but demean the roles they demand. And they expect virtue while longing for unrestrained sexuality.

The last, of course, is why they come to me.

My God, I hate that cycle. I have spent so much effort trying to dig myself out of the double standard that pandering to it, even in inverted and eroticized contexts, makes me angry.

Sometimes I feel that I’m providing a necessary service, a cool sip of water to ease my client’s descent into his self-made hell. He has a chaste wife, children in prep school, the boy on his way to college; divorce would be messy and a mistress is out of the question. For the good of many people he must uphold his familial agreements, and it hurts no one for him to see me every couple of weeks.

But sometimes I am simply the recipient of my client’s contempt. He’ll do the things with me that he’d never ask his girlfriend, and turn on me the disgust he feels toward his own desires. “He doesn’t mean it!” say soothing friends when I retell these stories. No, really, he does. And the venom of his derision is frightening to me at the time. But it’s not directed at me, and in that way, I shield myself. I am an actor, holding a place for a character who may only exist in his mind; however he reacts to her is his, and his alone.

Posted in Uncategorized, lgbt, misandry, the double standard, misogyny, feminism, pro domination