#GamerGirl & Bisexual Aesthetics
Random Musings of October: Just storing these in an organizedish way for future use. I’ll be sharing my next scholastic post — 19 Reasons Why Women Survive COVID19 More Than Men — soon. Until then, from all of us here at GamerGirl, please remember to wear a mask. Especially if you go somewhere on Halloween. [Additional citations to be added]
Lesbians & bisexual women have (on average) higher testosterone than straight women. Butch lesbians higher than femme lesbians & bisexual women.
Several lines of research have found the lower 2D:4D ratio to be associated with female athletes at various levels:
- youth level (Handball) (that’s a sport?) (Baker et al., 2013)
- high school varsity level (Giffin et al., 2012)
- NCAA level (college tennis) (Hsu et al., 2015)
- national level (Pokrywka et al., 2005)
- Olympic level (Eklund et al., 2020)
Research has also investigated outcomes associated with testosterone levels among female athletes:
- faster skiing times (Manning et al., 2002),
- better endurance running performance (Manning et al., 2007)
- better national fencing rank (Voracek et al., 2010).
- faster rowing times (Hull et al., 2015),
- stronger on bench press (Eklund et al., 2020)
And a recent study (in review) looked at athletes’ sexual orientation:
- non-heterosexual women’s superiority in the WNBA (Willis et al., in review)
If we accept one of the basic principles of the scientific method — that consistently observed phenomena reflect reality — then: Identical twins CAN differ sometimes.
For instance, monozygotic twins where one is lesbian & the other straight show different digit ratios. Specifically, the lesbian twins have digit ratios that are more masculine than their straight sisters.
However, this pattern has only been found in:
- Japan (Hiraishi et al., 2012)
- Europe (Watts et al., 2018)
- United States (Hall and Love, 2003)
Butch lesbians have more masculine ratios than femme lesbians (Brown et al., 2002).
Overall point
- if you gathered 100 women with a low 2D:4D digit ratio (ring finger longer than index finger) & 100 women with a high ratio (fingers are roughly equal), there would be more lesbians in the first group than in the second group.
Given the relevance of testosterone (specifically prenatal androgen exposure) in regards to this ratio, it should be easy to conclude that physiological differences in hormones are relevant biomarkers in female sexual orientation.
Even among straight women, those with a lower 2D:4D ratio are more likely to be tomboys (Atkinson et al., 2017).
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The Communication of Sexuality Via Appearance
#GamerGirl: Bunnyfran, did you cut your hair because short hair deconstructs the male gaze & threatens one of the phenotypic pillars of patriarchy the way tall women do?
Bunnyfran: I cut it because the dominant aesthetic codes of ‘‘looking butch’’ are ones against which lesbians are most strongly evaluated as being either queer or not. Having short hair means I’ll rank higher on the beauty scale due to its recognizability as a cue within the lesbian community (Hammidi et al., 1999).
Is your long-haired bae lesbian or is she bisexual like you?
GG: She’s lesbian & I love her long hair just like I loved Catbae’s short hair
Femme/feminine lesbians who can ‘pass’ as heterosexual may make the utilitarian decision to do so (Maltry & Tucker, 2002). Visibility brings vulnerability, and even though she may be criticized by other lesbians for failing to disavow a heteronormative appearance (Winn & Nutt, 2001), she’ll be safer from the dangers that butch lesbians are more likely to be at risk of (e.g., Eves, 2004; Krakauer & Rose, 2002).
Bunnyfran: But shared appearance is important for the creation of safe communities, especially outside of places like CA/NY (Eves, 2004; Krakauer & Rose, 2002).
Having a short haircut is one of the historically reliable ways to replace the male gaze with the female gaze (Luzzatto & Gvion, 2004; Huxley & Hayfield, 2012; Rifkin, 2002).
How do you even negotiate your appearance as a bisexual woman?
GG: !!!! Do you really want to do this right now?
[Part 1]
#Bisexual Aesthetic [Part 2]
#GamerGirl: Bisexual women like me can deftly identify straight males & lesbians, even though we don’t have a codified appearance like monosexuals (Clarke & Spence, 2013; Clarke & Turner, 2007; Holliday, 1999).
I had a different general aesthetic while dating that straight Elf guy (Huxley et al., 2011-male partner) than I do now while with my lesbian girlfriend (Rothblum, 2010- female partner).
And yeah, she’s femme & has long hair. It’s not as though all lesbians are inherently going to play a masculine role in a relationship with a bisexual woman. Such an essentialist assumption assumes that bisexual women don’t have a butch-femme-either-neither spectrum of their own… as if we needed any more erasure (Hayfield et al., 2013).
Bunnyfran: Sowwies, didn’t mean to imply anything
GG: Moreover, critiquing my my girlfriend’s long-hair shows your narrow view lesbian identity. It’s not just about the amount (if any) of makeup, the length (if any) of hair, the Doc Martens/jeans/ sleeveless shirt stereotype, tattoos or piercings. My girl has a swagger that can turn me on from a mile away.
Bunnyfran: So she’s not a bull-lesbian, or stone or baby… androgynous perhaps. You know, it seems like you had more variability in style when you were with the Elf guy.
GG: That’s just because straight males tend to be open to a wider range of what they may find desirable in women than vice-versa. Straight males are far more likely to date a tomboy than straight females are to date a tomgirl. Honestly the sex of who I’m currently dating doesn’t have some grand influence in my aesthetic.
Bunnyfran: Wait… so do lesbians have a narrower aesthetic range of what they find desirable in the women they date than straight men have in the women they date?
GG: ………………………….
#Bisexual Part 3: Bi-dar Doesn’t Exist
#GamerGirl: In short, there is no stereotypical or culturally recognized “visual bisexual identity” in the same way that people have a general degree of accuracy identifying LG individuals when sufficient visual cues have been provided (Hayfield et al., 2013).
#PronounPrivilege
I can’t use a pronoun to reveal my sexuality either. If I say I have a girlfriend, I’m assumed to be lesbian. If I say I have a boyfriend, I’m assumed to be straight. The exception is for people who I’ve been friends with over a timespan in which I had partners of each sex.
“…these bisexual women could not describe a distinct bisexual visual identity. Even when asked directly, participants struggled to
talk about bisexual looks, and all of them stated that bisexual women are not recognisable from their appearance. This suggests that a bisexual look cannot be talked about because it does not exist” (p. 176–177).
Bisexual Visual Identity
#Goth #Emo #Scene (Haines, Johnson, Carter, & Arora, 2009)
These aesthetics came up a lot as a potential bisexual identifier. Note, all the subjects were bisexual women, so it’s not clear if bisexual men would agree.
#Indie #IndieRock look
…this probably partially explains Jarryd dating primarily bisexual women for the past 15 years despite the statistical improbability of such a dating record. (Given the ratio of bisexual women to straight women, an implicit selection process with a preference for agentic, assertive, independent traits is likely at work)
#GG: Why do you assume agentic/ assertiveness is a bisexual trait? What are you assuming about monosexual women?
Narrator: You misunderstood me. I would just suggest that those traits would be associated with the more cultural-expectation-free, authentic-to-self style that bisexual women feel more comfortable wearing, especially given the pressure both straight women & lesbians are more likely to feel to dress a certain way for their respective social niches.
I would posit that bisexual women’s visual identity — which the bisexual women described as “free from constraints and as an unregulated identity” — reflects the potential of bisexual fluidity “to break down identity categories (Barker, Richards, & Bowes-Catton, 2009)” that remain attached (even in their resistance) to patriarchal norms (Hayfield et al., 2013).
GG: So a bisexual identity is the absence of an otherwise rigid — or perhaps more predictable — monosexual visual identity?
— — — — — End Scene — — — — —
Bae: Hey hun, how is the fact that men are more likely to own smartphones worldwide related to Siri having a female voice?
#GamerGirl : Because around the world men are more likely to own smartphones than women. Thus, It helps retain men as customers by giving them the pleasure of controlling the female voice.
Bae: Are you suggesting that blocking daughters’ access to a smartphone is a modern manifestation of sexist norms limiting women’s independence?
#GamerGirl: Exactly, based on the devaluation of daughters in patrilineal societies. Daughters aren’t legally allowed to carry on the family name or claim inheritance in such societies. Thus, they are controlled until their pa gives away the bride (like property) at traditional sexist weddings.
Bae: Ahh, so is that what the ancient sexist Roman Law of “Mulier est finis familiae” was referring to?
#GamerGirl: Yup, the marriage of daughters was basically a disinheritance in the ancient world. Enshrining paternal inheritance led to ancillary customs, such as female infanticide, families investing less in their daughters’ health, & sex-selective abortions. This eventually led to male biased sex ratios → generation of men who couldn’t marry because of all the women who weren’t born → increase in trafficking & other crime → more authoritarianism & despotism to police male aggression.
In short, the patriarchal sexist norms of many human societies has been the primary contributor to the issues of many human societies. Given that males have held the levers of power in many such societies, they failed to realize that they created the problems they were trying to solve.
[Strong correlation between Despotism & male violence across 186 societies (Betzig, 1986)]
BaeGirl: COVID19 research suggests that women with smartphones have been more responsible than men with smartphones (Okten et al., 2020).
#GamerGirl: Le sigh, yeah… tracking geolocation of 15 million smartphones over time revealed that counties with a higher % of women have more successfully socially distanced.
It makes the sex inequality in smartphone ownership even more nauseating.
They also found, once again, that women are more likely to wash their hands than men. Shocking
The Sex of Punctuation
#GamerGirl: Why do you use so many exclamation points when you play as me in #MMORPG?
Jarryd: Performing gender helps ensure that my guildmates assume I’m a woman in real life so I can continue to enjoy the benefits of playing as a woman (e.g., preferential treatment from male avatars). If I played as a Black male it would be like playing on hard mode.
I have stuff to do & playing as a woman is a significant time saver, assuming there are enough straight males online.
Exclamation points is just a part of the overall performance, but one with decades of research indicating that women use more exclamation points & exclamatory prose than males:
- Carol Scates (1981): women used more exclamation points
- Rubin & Greene (1992): women used more exclamation AND CAPITALIZATION
- Herring (1994): Women used more supportive discourse online; including more thanks/gratitude with exclamatory punctuation
- Winn & Rubin (2001): women used more nonessentials and excitability markers than men’’
- Colley & Todd (2002): women use “multiple exclamation points” more than men !!!!
- Waseleski (2006): women used more exclamation points; used for different reasons, not solely excitability
- Aybar (2019)
— — — — —
Deracialization & DeForeignization
#GamerGirl: Queer = White… but why?
How can I use my privilege as a bisexual Hyur woman avatar as an ally to the ElfLivesMatter movement & in deconstructing racial constructions of sexuality that erase the lived experiences of queer communities of color?
BaeGirl: …I thought you were Persian?
GamerGirl: Yeah but on every application they tell me to check the box for Hyur because apparently Persian means White.
BaeGirl: #smh — Perhaps I can work on the erasure of Persian identities while you work on literatures of deracialization faced by non-White individuals in our #PRIDE communities.
GamerGirl: That’s truly the full-circle decolonial healing that we need. To channel the decolonial narratives of feminist theorist Chela Sandoval, it’s through decolonial love that we can “address the wounds of coloniality by attending to the experiences of those most marginalized in order to make ethical, loving, and human relation possible” (Ureña 2017:99).
Bae: …but if gay = White, and people tend to see #AsianAmericans like #LucyLiu as more foreign/ less American than a non-American like #KateWinslet, is it possible that Asians perceived as gay would be seen as more American?
#GamerGirl: Yes. Americans who are Asian & gay are perceived as more similar to Americans who are White & ‘any orientation’ (Semrow et al., 2020).
BaeGirl: …sounds like *there are layers to this*
GamerGirl: Many — we’re really just scratching the surface. Discussing Black & White is a high school thesis. Discussing East Asian, Hispanic, #NativeAmerican, Middle Eastern, South Asian Indian, Black, Multiracial, White… and intersectionalities with sex, sexuality, gender/gender identity, religion…
We’re just getting started. #Psychology #NationalComingOutDay #AsianLivesMatter #Allyship #UCSD
— — — — —
Rage Becomes Her
See #RageBecomesHer by
for a truly rich discourse on
- the #AngryBlackWoman
- the #FieryLatina
- the #SadAsianWoman
and the ways in which men’s assertive communication is praised/respected/ permitted at baseline in a way that’s not true for women.
Chemaly, S. (2018). Rage Becomes Her.
#AngryBlackWoman — Part 1
#GamerGirl: Bunnyfran wants me to ask about something for her.
Catfran: Why doesn’t she just ask herself?
GG: Well, Ferguson and King (1996) discuss the experience of a 35-year-old Bunny-American woman Ph.D. in sociology. Her “time with the agency was described as a “perpetual cycle of misfortune and disparagement” (p. 49), and her insights were routinely “negated,” “rejected and dismissed as unimportant” (p. 50).
Performances of communicative directness by Bunny women is viewed “as acts of resistance in power imbalanced cultures (see also Davis, 2015; Hooks, 1989; Troutman, 2010) …connected to their work in the public sphere since the antebellum period onward, the necessity of Black women’s urgent speech as a platform for resistance, and the hesitation of White cultures to include Bunny women in cults of femininity characterized by colonial norms of politeness, reticence, and invisibility (Davis, 2015; Troutman, 2010)” (Woodson, 2020, p. 570).
#AngryBlackWoman — Part 2
#GamerGirl: In addition, “Bunny women’s speech is routinely characterized as intense, intimidating, and overly critical (Hecht et al., 2003; Troutman, 2010)” … which “corresponds to perceptions that Black women are argumentative, confrontational, and aggressive, resulting in increased disciplinary referrals and sanctions in schools (Fordham, 1993; Hill, 2016; Lei, 2003; Morris, 2007, 2017; Morris, 2013, 2016; Nyachae & Ohito 2019; Stevens, 2002; Watson, 2016)” (Woodson, 2020, p. 571).
Catfran: Well, never trust someone whose ears are longer than mine, I always say. #Meow
“this characterization of Mrs. Obama echoed the common trope that her husband was emasculated by her anger. She was cast as a “darker, continuous, and hidden side” of the chief executive, himself constrained in expressing anger in a way that a white president undoubtedly (and now, thanks to Donald Trump, blatantly) is not.”
“Black women are stereotyped in this way, but they are also disproportionately likely to be vocal leaders and … are more likely to serve in extra-institutional contexts, meaning outside of recognized and traditional institutions and hierarchies — at the forefront, for example, of criminal justice reform, reproductive and racial justice movements, disability rights, and environmental and climate change activism. In either case, they are often influential in positions that are resistant to the status quo“ (Soraya Chemaly, 2018, p. 244).
“Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, seemed to get angry for [Hillary]. Warren rage tweeted endlessly, often with open aggression, behavior that was more palatable coming from her, as she was not perceived as acting on her own behalf“ Soraya Chemaly — Rage Becomes Her (p . 243)
Woodson, 2020 [Directness vs. Utilitarian Adaptation]
- Black girls’ directness is often interpreted as too forceful and aggressive according to White discursive norms (potentially resulting in a decreased sense of psychologically safety both for Black girls and their listeners).
- “…if I don’t put on my White girl voice [the teacher] will not come over to my side of the room at all. She’ll just ignore me. So loud Black female in a White girl voice, that’s the equation.”
- Black girls use or understand directness to be an act of resistance in dysfunctional cultures and to disrupt past systems of exclusion and invisibility.
- It is possible that [the teacher’s] desire for observable demonstrations of in-class learning were motivated by concerns unrelated to racial and gender bias. [The student’s] perceptions are nonetheless valid as they shaped how she experienced the classroom and ultimately how she chose to respond to [the teacher’s] expectations.
[The student’s] constant negotiation of real or perceived racial and gendered stereotypes implies she did not understand the classroom as psychologically safe and chose directness as a way to draw attention to her reality.
- [The student’s] satirical performance of the canonical good student is a good example of smart talk or sass and the related concept of signifying (Morgan, 1996; Smitherman, 2000; Troutman, 2010). Signifying is a form indirect directness (Spears, 2001) and a strategy used to camouflage insult or negative criticism just enough to prevent further confrontation. Informed listeners in the classroom would draw on shared knowledge and context cues — such as Monica’s usual tone and behavior, the conflict between Monica and Mrs. Thompson, and stereotypes of White speech — to make sense of Monica’s performance in the moment. Monica was playing the game, or acknowledging and assimilating to a hidden, scripted curriculum of what learning sounds like, but making it clear she was just playing.
- Mamie Till’s directness (in keeping the casket open) = a last resort for recognition, when recognition is an insufficient but only remaining consolation for injustice. An important race-specific consideration here is that just as some children are more vulnerable to personal and structural trauma, some children are also more likely to hear stories of historical and cultural trauma that relate to their racial, ethnic, gendered, sexual, and religious identities (Hines-Datiri & Carter Andrews, 2017; Woodson & Carter Andrews, 2017; Wun, 2016).
On Black Females: Lee, 2014
- “…an interviewee delivered her experience of representing herself with a Black-looking avatar as follows:
… Surprisingly, a girl that I vaguely knew was there and immediately approached me… ‘’What happened?’’
She went on, ‘’You look like a freak!’’
I was cautious and went on to ask why. She explained that being black on #Whyville looks just wrong. I was appalled! I couldn’t believe that this happened on my first day, my first hour of being a black Whyvillian (Kafai et al., 2010, p. 51)”
#GamerGirl: You know how in Milgrams’ obedience studies ppl were more likely to shock the learner when they were just a shadow on the wall vs when they were in the same room?
Bae: Yeah, easier to hurt someone who seems far away
GamerGirl: Yup!!!! Well anyway, ppl are more likely to criticize/yell at a female phone operator than a female cashier.
#GamerGirl: When the SelfCheckout makes an error, people blame, yell at, & criticize “her” — the female voice in all our public machines.