Sexuality like gender is not a strict binary of heterosexual or homosexual. Research in psychology and human sexuality has recognized a spectrum of sexuality.
However anyone who doesn't fall into that false binary often finds themselves facing ignorant questions and comments passed off as jokes.
A bisexual woman and her wife fielded the same joke over and over from their friends. However after a friend got upset over their response, they turned to the "Am I The A**hole" (AITA) subReddit for feedback.
Redditor Extension_Ingenuity7 asked:
"AITA for saying to my straight women friends that the D was overrated and they put up with too much for it?"
The Original Poster (OP) explained:
"My wife and I are both women and both 36. We have 2 kids, 5 and 2."
"Since we started dating 8 years my straight friends have always made snide little jokes about how we must be missing 'D' once in awhile since both my wife and I are bisexual."
"Usually I've been able to just bat back with jokes about how the D ain't worth what they put up with etc... I've noticed these jokes crop up when they've finished complaining about their husbands and I don't have anything to say about my wife."
"However lockdown has been hard for my straight friends. It's been hard for my wife and I but it's been particularly hard for my friends because a lot of the online schooling and housework has fallen to them but it hasn't for us."
"Most of the time I keep my mouth shut and just sympathise. So then after one nighttime Zoom call, everyone else finished venting and my wife and I were asked how our lockdown was going."
"I said it was tough but we are managing."
"Then one of my friends asked me if my wife was helping out, I said she was, we've never had problems on that front which is true. She then said her husband needed to work so she had to take over parenting."
"I just said that must be tough. Then she said something weird—that because my wife has a PhD and I have a masters her work is more important, so I should be doing more."
"My wife then said that nothing was more important than our kids."
"I think she took that as a criticism against her own husband because she started to talk about how important her husband was at work etc... but then it again veered into how much she's doing at home while trying to WFH [work from home] and then said how lucky we (my wife and I) were."
"My wife and I just agreed with that statement. And then of course: 'I'm so happy everything is great for you but don't you miss the D?'"
"I was thinking 'here we go again' so I bantered back like I usually do and said we had plenty of D in different shapes and sizes at home with a shorter refractory period and that they put up with too much for the privilege of having one attached to a man."
"All my other friends on the call laughed and one even said that they should probably get themselves a wife with a penis. The friend who had a jab at me however, told me I was being crass and left the call."
"The rest of us stayed on but we were subjected to a flurry of texts about how she was in a fragile place and I needed to be more empathetic because some of us are having a harder lockdown than others."
"I pointed out that she was the one that made the D joke first but my friends reached out privately and told me that my friend was at the end of her rope and to drop it because it wasn't going to go anywhere."
"I pushed the issue however and told my friend she wasn't allowed to bring up missing D ever again if I wasn't allowed to talk about it and I was subjected to several more paragraphs about how I was always evangelising lesbianism.
"I just typed back that we aren't lesbians and muted her chat."
"AITA?"
Redditors weighed in by declaring:
- NTA - Not The A**hole
- YTA - You're The A**hole
- NAH - No A**holes Here
- ESH - Everyone Sucks Here
Redditors declared the OP and her wife were not the a**holes.
"NTA. I think crass to her means 'you're confronting me with truth and that hurts my built reality'." ~ External_Outcome5678
"That or the not friend was expecting OP to have replied 'Yes we miss the D, crave it even'. Not having done so was crass to the not friend." ~ Cjhwahaha
"Her position seems to be 'Yes, my husband is useless, but at least he's not a woman'."
"She has to have someone to feel superior to, and is annoyed that OP isn't supporting this view by agreeing that women are inferior to men." ~ Barbed_Dio
"Yeah I think this is it. Many hetero women get a shit deal where they do twice as much work for no recognition and then justify it by saying it's because their husband works more (or their job brings home more money), so it's totally reasonable to expect to do more work at home for free to equal it out."
"They genuinely believe it's a fair set up because believing otherwise would force them to confront their own subconscious, sexist beliefs—and it's also much easier to just keep doing what they've been doing than try to get their husband to change."
"Seeing OP's set up shatters that illusion though, because even though one partner may make more money or have a more 'important' job, they share household duties equally and are somehow still relatively happy."
"This forces OP's friend to either find something wrong with OP's relationship or admit there is something wrong with hers." ~ MellyBean2012
"NTA. If you can't take the heat don't dish it out." ~ dragonsroar943
"This doesn't even sound like that low of a bar. It sounds like this is a common bit they all partake in."
"If you don't want someone to ask 'who's there,' don't start a knock knock joke." ~ batosai33
"Emphatically NTA. Your friends sound annoying—their joking about the D might be passable once depending on your relationship with them, but bringing it up constantly is disrespectful of you and your wife's relationship."
"It's true that lockdown is harder on some people, and that some relationships ended up being more strained than others—but that's in no way your fault."
"LGBTQA+ relationships tend to be harder earned, and further away from toxic gender models, so on average, they fare better now—but the cheeky takeaway here is that straight people really need to start getting married to people they actually like (I'm writing this as a bi person in a straight relationship.)"
"You and your wife have that, and that's good for you. You weren't even flaunting it, you just sent their joke back at them. You did nothing wrong." ~ Edhie421
A good rule to follow is don't ask questions you don't want answered. The OP's friend found that out the hard way.
