It doesn’t bother me one bit if people want to use a word to mean something different to them. It changes nothing in my relationships what they do or say.
What I do hate is your complaining about a group of people based on their sexuality. Seems so bitter.
It’s heteronormative if you equate topping with being dominant.
Dancing is typically heteronormative because there’s a standard (that’s enforced for competitive dancing) that the man leads and the woman follows. And you can absolutely follow this as a same sex couple by assigning femme and butch roles and having the femme follow and the butch lead. But you can also switch it up, even while dancing.
When someone talks about heteronorms it’s not about straight people. Of course toxic masculinity and ditto femininity is sad but the goal is not to reproduce that for queers, not too change what the straights are up to.
Oh please, it’s clearly obvious there is nothing heteronormative about hetero people using topping to mean something else. Peoples having a different meaning is not the same as enforcing themselves as the default, it’s not even tangentially related.
I fail to see any issue with the post (like fucking everyone associates topping with dom that doesn’t mean it has to be, and the image works), but it’s decidedly a complaint about social norms rather than a group. Even if I think it’s not a valid complaint because wtf does it have to do with heteronormativity.
I understand heteronormative to be about social norms centered around heterosexuality, and how that is the dominant cultural factor.
With that understanding, viewing things through a heteronormative lens is to exclude or diminish the views of non-heterosexual folks.
Then “heteronormative bullshit” is comparable to “heterosexual bullshit”.
I might’ve missed some nuance - this is not my forte. However my naive understanding is that saying this was commentary on “cultural norms” is similar to saying to civil war was about “states rights”. States rights to do what? (Slavery) Cultural norms centered around what? (Heterosexuality)
I definitely agree with you re: comment being confusing - it seems to largely be a complaint about folks being vanilla and not knowing the nuances of vocabulary describing relationships, which affects folks regardless of sexual orientation.
Hmm, as someone relatively deep into lgbtq issues (though particularly trans issues), I’d say the term itself is perhaps a bit misleading. The way I understand it and see it used is that it’s about heterosexuality and also gender norms within that traditional heterosexual relationship (so some people think that even in a homosexual relationship there’s always “a man” (dominant) and “a woman” (submissive)).
In that sense (to directly relate to the post) a dominant woman in a relationship with a submissive man would actually go against heteronormativity a bit.
On second thought I guess I can see the relation though, in the sense that the traditional “man is dominant in a hetero relationship” combined with the fact that by default most men probably mostly top could make someone see “topping is considered dominant” as reinforcing those traditional relationship norms. Still feels very overreactive by the original commenter but eh.
Thanks for taking the time to walk through your thoughts - I appreciate the conversation.
I think the particularly egregious problem with interpreting the comment as referring to the association of man=top=dom is that the meme has a gal as the dom, as you’ve pointed out, which does go against heteronormativity.
It doesn’t bother me one bit if people want to use a word to mean something different to them. It changes nothing in my relationships what they do or say.
What I do hate is your complaining about a group of people based on their sexuality. Seems so bitter.
It’s heteronormative if you equate topping with being dominant.
Dancing is typically heteronormative because there’s a standard (that’s enforced for competitive dancing) that the man leads and the woman follows. And you can absolutely follow this as a same sex couple by assigning femme and butch roles and having the femme follow and the butch lead. But you can also switch it up, even while dancing.
When someone talks about heteronorms it’s not about straight people. Of course toxic masculinity and ditto femininity is sad but the goal is not to reproduce that for queers, not too change what the straights are up to.
It’s not heteronormative oh person with a hammer. You simply lack perspective, as yours seems entirely based on sex and literally none from kink.
Doming and Topping are two different things in the kink world, and imply similar yet drastically different things and are very deliminaited in play.
And even to the comic, it’s BDSM/kink coded more than anything.
“heteronormative” doesn’t mean “it’s the fault of straight people” are you serious
if you don’t know a word, you can just look it up yknow
You’re the only person here saying that.
and it’s only you who’s saying that ryedaft was “complaining about a group of people based on sexuality”
Oh please, it’s clearly obvious there is nothing heteronormative about hetero people using topping to mean something else. Peoples having a different meaning is not the same as enforcing themselves as the default, it’s not even tangentially related.
Fwiw, I’m hetero and having a girl on top feels like they have more, if not all, control.
I never subscribed to homosexual dichotomy of tops and bottoms. Long ago, I learnt that there were “active” and “passive” roles.
I guess it’s generational. Like “old” terms that sound antique or even “wrong”.
But does “heteronormative bullshit” imply that?
What if they’d said “I’m tired of this homosexual bullshit that glitter goes everywhere?”
That definitely reads as “I believe it’s the fault of the queer people” to me, do you believe otherwise?
Heteronormative != heterosexual
I fail to see any issue with the post (like fucking everyone associates topping with dom that doesn’t mean it has to be, and the image works), but it’s decidedly a complaint about social norms rather than a group. Even if I think it’s not a valid complaint because wtf does it have to do with heteronormativity.
I understand heteronormative to be about social norms centered around heterosexuality, and how that is the dominant cultural factor.
With that understanding, viewing things through a heteronormative lens is to exclude or diminish the views of non-heterosexual folks.
Then “heteronormative bullshit” is comparable to “heterosexual bullshit”.
I might’ve missed some nuance - this is not my forte. However my naive understanding is that saying this was commentary on “cultural norms” is similar to saying to civil war was about “states rights”. States rights to do what? (Slavery) Cultural norms centered around what? (Heterosexuality)
I definitely agree with you re: comment being confusing - it seems to largely be a complaint about folks being vanilla and not knowing the nuances of vocabulary describing relationships, which affects folks regardless of sexual orientation.
Hmm, as someone relatively deep into lgbtq issues (though particularly trans issues), I’d say the term itself is perhaps a bit misleading. The way I understand it and see it used is that it’s about heterosexuality and also gender norms within that traditional heterosexual relationship (so some people think that even in a homosexual relationship there’s always “a man” (dominant) and “a woman” (submissive)).
In that sense (to directly relate to the post) a dominant woman in a relationship with a submissive man would actually go against heteronormativity a bit.
On second thought I guess I can see the relation though, in the sense that the traditional “man is dominant in a hetero relationship” combined with the fact that by default most men probably mostly top could make someone see “topping is considered dominant” as reinforcing those traditional relationship norms. Still feels very overreactive by the original commenter but eh.
Thanks for taking the time to walk through your thoughts - I appreciate the conversation.
I think the particularly egregious problem with interpreting the comment as referring to the association of man=top=dom is that the meme has a gal as the dom, as you’ve pointed out, which does go against heteronormativity.
Your second thought was my first thought tbh