Le Creep C’est Chic: Why a Ladylike Upbringing Is a Threat to Queer Womanhood
<p>D<strong>id any other queer women feel like monstrous perverts for being actively attracted to other women growing up?</strong></p>
<p>The thing I found the most challenging growing up as a lesbian, surprisingly, wasn’t the risk of <a href="https://medium.com/prismnpen/what-being-disowned-by-my-family-on-christmas-day-taught-me-about-love-b736414bc326?sk=80cc6c86590a3fa782a6ff50970d198d" rel="noopener">familial rejection</a>, struggling to find queer community or even the potential for future discrimination.</p>
<p>My main struggle was reconciling my sexual attraction to women and the level of discomfort it made me feel.</p>
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<p>“…women who love women is an impossible category for how we grew up… the only options are women who love men and men who love women, so if I love women then I must be a man…” — <a href="https://www.instagram.com/allybeardsley/?hl=en" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Ally Beardsley</a>.</p>
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<p>I was raised by a traditional mother who was born in the ’50s with stringent ideas about what it means to be a woman.</p>
<p>Her perception of womanhood went hand-in-hand with the archetypal model of femininity — passivity, deference, and social submission. Women were supposed to be well-behaved and ladylike, never outspoken or notably verbose, just stellar examples of virtue and humbly desirous of validation from men.</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/prismnpen/le-creep-cest-chic-why-a-ladylike-upbringing-is-a-threat-to-queer-womanhood-b735fedaebe6"><strong>Learn More</strong></a></p>