My Experience With Comphet
When you’re a woman, being attractive and desirable to men is your purpose. That’s why we’re told to shave, wear makeup and dress up (but not too much). When you google “Best … for women”, the results are from articles like “Men find these … irresistible”. But what if it’s not men I want to attract?
Personally, it took me a long time to just ask myself this question, “Am I even attracted to men?” Even though as a child, I did have a fat crush on Musa from Winx Club and an odd fixation on boobs. But these things never seemed very meaningful to me. Men and women, that’s how children think the world is supposed to look like. Recently I suggested to a few 7-year-old girls that their brother and his very close friend might be more than just friends, and they laughed and said “It doesn’t work like that, they’re both boys.”
When I was a child, all I thought dating was, was a man and a woman hanging out. All a crush was to me, was a boy I could endure spending time with, so in kindergarten and elementary school I’d just pick a boy to have a crush on. My friend thinks this boy’s cute? Must be true then, he’ll be my crush too from now on. From an early age on I calculated a boy's value on the dating market, so I knew I’d make a good choice when choosing who to crush on. Is he popular? Is he conventionally attractive? Is he attainable? If the answers were yes/yes/no, there you had my new crush.
Even to this day, I have a very difficult time differentiating my relationships with men, and whether they are of platonic or romantic nature. This might also be rooted in my lack of a father figure growing up, but because of this I never had any male friends. As soon as a boy approached me, especially if I had picked him as my crush, I avoided him at all costs, and sometimes even became a little mean in order to get rid of him. I never knew why, and at some point just thought I must be socially inept, even though I never had any of these problems with other girls.
Once I started slightly suspecting I might not be into boys at the age of 13, I told myself “No, that can’t be, you’ve always liked men!” I grabbed onto every piece of evidence that might help me prove myself that I was straight. At this time I became a Kpop stan and obsessed over any boy group member I could get my eyes on. I forced myself to read fanfictions and enjoy these heterosexual fantasies, which really just made me uncomfortable. I sacrificed my time, money, and energy for boys I was not attracted to, just to ensure my heterosexual alibi was fool-proof.
My perception of my sexuality changed when I was 14 and moved out of my hometown for a year into a bigger and less conservative town. In a new school, in a new town, I had the ability to reinvent myself. My style became more feminine and I started wearing Mascara, I made friends with the straightest girls I could find and made myself fit in. I was an even better straight girl than I had been before, and I had fun playing that role. But then, in the second semester of my freshman year, my country went into lockdown. All of a sudden there was no one I could show off my perceived straightness to, like an award. At that time a lot of things came together for me, and I fell into quite the depressive episode. First, I cut my bangs, then I cut my hair to chin length. It still looked very feminine considering I have curly hair, but it was definitely an important change for me. Then, on July 2nd of 2020, I shaved my head. I had wanted to do it for a long time, especially since it was all over my FYP. That afternoon I saw a pretty girl with big eyeliner and a shaved head at the bus stop, and that just triggered something in me. At home, I put on the video of Joana Ceddia shaving her head, so I didn’t feel lonely doing it.
People had very different reactions. Even though my father didn’t scold me for it or anything, he of course preferred me with my long, blond-ish curls, but I didn’t really care. The next day at school, everybody was very surprised, but especially a lot of the girls told me that it suited me, and I felt the most myself I ever had at that time. Touching my scalp for the first time, felt like finally meeting the very essence of me. Of course, the buzz cut didn’t solve all my problems, but it made me more comfortable questioning myself. Here are some signs of Compulsory Heterosexuality I have found so far:
Thinking of being with a man is something you could endure, but wouldn’t strive for.
When you think of heterosexual sex, you focus on the woman.
When you have sexual fantasies of men, they’re faceless, or you’re in a position where you can’t see their faces.
You’ve had close friendships with girls, that would have counted as dating if your friend was a guy.
You observe your straight female friends and try to mimic their taste in men.
If a boy reciprocates your “interest”, you immediately lose any affection towards him.
You like feminine fictional men (like anime characters with long hair and an androgynous style, that might as well be women).
You think stuff like “girls are generally more attractive”, is just common knowledge.
If you ever had sex with a man, you saw it more as something that just had to be done and endured, rather than enjoyed.
You feel like you can’t possibly be a lesbian because it’s too final a word.
The thing is, if nobody ever started calling themselves a lesbian, we wouldn’t exist at all. So don’t be shy, even if you realize at some point that you’re actually not a lesbian, nobody (in their right mind) will shun you for it. Just go by whatever you think is safe and makes you feel comfortable <3.
Now, I’m 16, and even though I’m not publicly out, I feel pretty comfortable labeling myself as a lesbian. Sure, every two to three months I do still test out if I could technically like a guy, but by now I have developed some techniques to conquer comp-het, and I hope they might help you too:
Surround yourself with constant reminders of lesbianism the same way we automatically are reminded of heterosexuality in society. Consume lesbian media, go to Pride events, make friends in your community.
When you feel the need to “crush” on a guy, think about how much more you’d like him if he was a girl.
When you get the opportunity to appeal to a man you don’t care about, look around and remind yourself of all the pretty girls you’d rather appeal to.
If you’re struggling to come to terms with being a lesbian, sometimes it’s better to just put the whole sexuality thing aside for a moment and go back to it when you’re more stable.
I’m very excited to see what my lesbian future has in store for me, and you can be excited too. A lot of people view queer people often taking longer to grow into their sexuality as a negative, whereas it just makes me appreciate my attraction to women even more. And if you’re reading this and you’re like “no, I really am attracted to men”, good for you, you don’t have to be a lesbian to be valid as a WLW.