12:20pm July 19, 2013

➸ Urocyon's Jaunts: What I mean about confusing sexuality categories, part 2.

youneedacat:

youneedacat:

[snip]

So that’s why my sexual orientation was so confusing to me for awhile. There was what was going on inside me sexually, and what the world wanted me to be, and I had a really hard time telling those things apart for awhile, especially given language, cognitive, and…

Oh yes the open jokes about attractiveness.

Many of my bullies masquerading as friends referred to me as “Karl’s troll".

And Karl kept saying he thought I was beautiful “no matter what anyone said".

I was hairy with a unibrow, bad hygiene, unshaven legs and pits, and no bra. These were all used against me. Plus the way I moved and talked and a reputation as a drug user that began before I ever used drugs and attributed autistic traits to drug use, and always exceeded my actual drug use.

Also I dressed in an odd way and basically wore stim toys as jewelry.
But yeah people openly referred to me as a troll. In high school also “Aztec goddess of death", no clue where that came from.

People said the only reason they put up with me at all was I “came with" Karl. There was a much more popular couple where the girl also had “problems". Everyone worried about her, asked how she was doing. Everyone OTOH just expected me to be messed up and unhappy and didn’t really care what happened to me.

Only briefly because at work, but…geez, it seriously and unfailingly weirds me out the degree to which “female attractiveness" is considered contingent on how much hair we have and where it is located.

Yeah the unibrow part is the one that weirds me out the most. And that everyone seemed to want me to pluck but for some reason I couldn’t make myself. I can’t imagine my face without hair on the bridge of my nose.

But it also is so strange because it’s like one centimetre of hair. In between two places where hair is normal. So what is the big deal? Yet people treat it like a joke, or like the universal mark of ugliness.

One time I saw another girl with a unibrow and said “see, I don’t need to pluck it, people like her okay!” And the person said “but that’s different she’s from another culture” (knowing nothing of her culture of course).

But with me it was always like… an excuse. Other kids could get away with unibrows, I couldn’t, and it was because I was autistic.

So I heard things like “Spock’s sister” and “why do your eyebrows meet in the middle” and “unibrow ree-tard” from the moment I entered school. Every single day.

I don’t have Spock eyebrows at all. I guess they just were associating us because we both had unusual eyebrows? And the only way I can raise one eyebrow at once is if you define the whole thing as one eyebrow because they were connected.

Was also bugged because hairy legs and armpits and upper lip and eventually chin. And also I couldn’t brush my hair so people bugged me about that too.

Also I had this weird set of exchanges with one of the bullies-masquerading-as-friends over this. He’s a compulsive liar and he gave a different answer every time all I doubt he’s trustworthy, but it’s interesting that he thought these were believable responses.

I asked why his ex didn’t like me. And his series of responses at different times were:

“Because your eyebrows meet in the middle.”

“Because you never brushed your hair.”

“Because you had hairy legs.”

Just on what planet are those reasonable reasons to hate someone?

Notes: