aegipan-omnicorn:

rescuemepotts:

tomcats-and-tophats:

garliccloves:

classical-cacophony:

wardencommanderrodimiss:

this is too real

Note this doesn’t work for bi girls!! 

Mara Wilson is a bisexual woman

Boy bands are almost overwhelmingly cultivated around the easiest way to sell shit to young girls, which very heavily leans into societally dominant heterosexual love story narratives, which in themselves tend to focus on specific attitudes towards gender roles, presentation, and styles of attraction. 

Bi women are not straight so we do not conceptualize our gender and attraction the same way a straight woman would because we do not function under the same societal pressures and dynamics. Ergo, the marketing around and content within the songs by many boy bands can be incredibly alienating to a bi woman audience even if they still experience attraction to men because we often do not experience that attraction in a way palpable to or even considered by those cultivating the public image of these bands.

Accusing Mara Wilson, a bi woman, of bi erasure, for sharing an amusing anecdote on her own experience, is ridiculous. But it is also an incredible disservice to bi women like myself who are more than acutely aware that we are (and always have been) a far cry from this media’s target audience – and it is, in fact, a demonstration of the effects of bi erasure that people so stalwartly align us with heterosexuality that we’re accused of erasing ourselves when we talk about our alienation from mainstream m/f-focused media.

My parents wouldn’t let me listen to Backstreet or Nsync because they thought a 6 year old shouldn’t be interested in boys. But they let me listen to Spice Girls and I’m pretty sure that was the beginning of my gay awakening

[Image description: a string of tweets from Mara Wilson (quote):

Want to know if a woman in her 20s or 30s likes women? Ask them which boy band was her favorite growing up.

If she has to think about it for more than a second, or shrugs, or stares blankly, she likes women.

My girl friends all had crushes on boy band members and had strong affinities for them, but I could never muster up more enthusiasm than “I guess Howie is cute” or “Justin has a good voice.” (unquote)
Timestamped: 11/17/17, 4:34 PM. Description ends]

Note: the same is true for asexual girls.

Granted, I had aged out of girlhood by the time “boy bands,” as a thing, became the huge phenomenon of NSYNC and Backstreet
Boys (I entered first grade in 1970 – I’m right on the cusp between the last
of the Baby Boomers and the first of Gen-X’ers, depending on which
social scientist is doing the counting). But I basically had that same, blank stare, “give me a minute to think” reaction to teen heartthrob TV and movie stars, which, like the boy bands of the 1990s and early Naughts, were heavily packaged romantic properties.

And it never even occurred to me to think about which women I thought were attractive, because, growing up in an even more heteronormative generation than now, no one thought to ask my opinion on them. But if they had, I would would have had to stare and shrug and think a minute…