I’m going to expand on yesterday’s post about the new idea I have for NaNoWriMo. I may not specifically say what I plan to do, but in talking around it, I’m sure you’ll get the general gist. I mentioned that Ask A Manager thread in the weekend forum about if it was possible for a single woman to be friends with a married man. Like I said, most of the responses were dispiriting, and there was one that blew my mind. So much so, I could not stop thinking about it. I’m paraphrasing, but this was the general gist:
I am the QUEENof my marriage and my husband better not even DARE think about another woman for even a second. She definitely said she was the queen, which made me sad for her in the first place. Then, however, she said that nonbinary people could not have an opinion because it wasn’t the same!
Um, hello? We were raised in this deeply sexist society, too. She did not mention agender, but I’m sure she would think even less of us than she clearly does of nonbinary people.
Her basic gist was that she was so insecure in her marriage, she couldn’t bear the thought of her husband even talking to another woman when he absolutely didn’t have to (like a coworker as a suggestion of when he had to talk to another woman). I wanted to find out who her husband was and tell him to flee, but he was either codependent or abused, so it wouldn’t have done any good.
Also, I couldn’t help thinking how pathetic she was. To be that insecure must be hell. Forbidding her husband from having any female friends is just…sad. Not just for her husband, but for her as well. But she was just at the extreme end of a very dispiriting spectrum.
This is one reason diversity is important. Those of us in the queer world have a diffreent perspective on this. Because same-gender attraction has not been a focal point of anything or scrutinized in the way opposite-gender attraction has been*, wo don’t carry the same ‘it’s the only thing that matters’ attitude that straight pople have.
That’s my amateur psychologist thought about it. To put it plainly, when you’re already on the fringes, you can see the bullshit for what it is. And all these rules saying what you should and shouldn’t do–will not stop two people who want to bone. That’s really it plain and simple. If two people want to do the nasty, they are going to do the nasty. You can say no emails or no one-on-ones. You can add that they can only speak in semaphores and with one eye shut. They can’t look below the neck or reference anything even vaguely mention anything sexual.
People. Will. Bonk. I mean, if they’re determined to bonk. You can put all the rules and restricitons in place that you want to, and people will go around them. I’m not saying this as a resigned ‘well, everyone cheats’ kind of way. I really am not. I just want people to think about maybe monogamy isn’t the be-all, end-all they think it is.