buffer-overrun (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fandomnumbergenerator) wrote2015-12-18 05:45 pm
fandomnumbergenerator) wrote2015-12-18 05:45 pm
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"How could you have joined them, Lady B? Apparently very easily.
It wasn’t that you had greater things in mind. No, greater things we would have forgiven. If you had said, It’s hopeless, girls, I’m jumping ship, we would have understood. If you had told us you’d come to believe we were wrong or wicked or unnatural, we would have respected your opinion. If you had said you were embarrassed. Or tired. Or if you’d admitted you just felt like a change of air. If you had told us anything at all, we would have agreed to disagree. Unlike yourself, the rest of us actually believed what we said about self-determination, right to choose, and even, heaven help our innocence, allowing one another space. But you didn’t have the decency to tell us."
It wasn’t that you had greater things in mind. No, greater things we would have forgiven. If you had said, It’s hopeless, girls, I’m jumping ship, we would have understood. If you had told us you’d come to believe we were wrong or wicked or unnatural, we would have respected your opinion. If you had said you were embarrassed. Or tired. Or if you’d admitted you just felt like a change of air. If you had told us anything at all, we would have agreed to disagree. Unlike yourself, the rest of us actually believed what we said about self-determination, right to choose, and even, heaven help our innocence, allowing one another space. But you didn’t have the decency to tell us."
— Rebecca Brown, “Lady Bountiful and the Underground Resistance” The Terrible Girls (1990)
I think I am bringing too much of my own baggage to this book, but I am having problems reading it as anything other than a parable about the evils of bisexual women. Which, like, can’t be right. But it is full of so many dog whistle phrases, and then the narrator says that her ex is literally worse than the capitalist overlord who has been exploiting and murdering women (”In short, dear Lady B, that fat old man is no longer the enemy. You are.”). So somebody with a less hot-button reaction to the book, please help me.