in defence of the “useless lesbian”

polyamorouspixie:

Sometimes I see people say, you shouldn’t call yourself useless, it’s demeaning, this sort of thing. I do see their point. The thing is, I think Useless Lesbian as a term is really useful, and you know me, I’m going to explain why. Here are some facts. 

-Women are not socially trained to make the first move
-Women are acutely aware of how gross and threatening it can be when someone hits on you and you don’t feel comfortable saying no so we tend to err on the cautious side of “not being a creep”

These two facts add up to, women really, really struggle to form romantic and sexual relationships with other women. It simply is much harder than male-female and male-male pairings to get off the ground for those reasons. Even when you’re aware of it and try to just do it anyway, it’s so hard. Bisexual and gay women are more likely to suffer from mental health problems like anxiety, too, which makes it worse. 

When you think it’s just you, that every other woman is going out flirting with every maybe-gay they meet, and you can’t do it, and they’re all just not hitting on you for some reason, even though men hit on you (even when you don’t want them to), that can be super isolating and discourages women further from making the first move. 

But when there’s a name for this, that makes such a difference, because now, we’re all in this together, we’re all having this problem and it’s no one’s fault (except maybe men but this isn’t about them). And that, for me at least, makes it easier to try to push past it.