joolabee:

there have been a frankly ridiculous amount of posts on my dashboard lately insisting to point blank that certain fictional characters in non-canon relationships are “bottoms” or “tops”

there are a few problems with this that I’d like to address:

• it’s perfectly fine to have a preference. it’s pornography, really, so read what you like. who cares. This isn’t the actual problem.
• the problem is the insistence that someone is “sexually dominant” because of their personality, and thus would never, ever, take a dick up their ass
• intentionally or not, by doing this, you are perpetuating the idea that penetration is inherently powerful, and to be penetrated is inherently weak
• I mean, if you start applying this sexual framing to heterosexual couples, you can already see where the waters get murky and that by assigning a “bottom” and “top” to a male homosexual relationship, you’re kind of asking “who’s the woman”
• I mean this in the worst way possible; it’s fucking pissing me off
• the whole concept of bottoming and topping is extremely bizarre; it’s not something that’s hard-wired into anybody; I have a friend that almost considered dumping a guy because he was afraid that “we might both be bottoms” and I just
• pLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST
• the idea that a “tough guy” can’t enjoy being penetrated is entirely part of an ongoing gay panic in our culture that very much boils down to “I was the one doing the penetrating so no homo, I’m still a man”
• because it is insulting to be penetrated, it is insulting to be subordinate to a man by being fucked, and it is insulting to be a woman
• i’ve also seen talk of people saying, “well, if he bottomed, he’d ‘bottom from the top’ and be really in charge about it” etc etc
• this??? isn’t better??? anybody can enjoy being penetrated and enjoy being sexually “submissive” without it having anything to do with their personality or authority as a human being
• please stop

I leave you with this quote from Julia Serano in Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (“Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism,” pg 329):

[…] imagine what would happen if, instead of centering our beliefs about heterosexual sex around the idea that the man “penetrates” the woman, we were to say that the woman’s vagina “consumes” the man’s penis. This would create a very different set of connotations, as the woman would become the active initiator and the man would be the passive and receptive party.

I don’t blame anybody for saying the things that have bothered me. I resist the word “internalize” because it’s more than that – it’s something that’s been pushed into your subconscious since before you can remember. but now, hopefully, you know, and all I ask is that you think about the implications of what you’re saying before you say it

So smart!  And I know at least a few people who’ll be sitting there going, “FUCK YES I’VE BEEN SAYING THIS.”