(really quickly: Top-Vers-Bottom and Dominant-Switch-Submissive are separate concepts with their own history but the phrases have become conflated in popular discourse. When specifically talking about this particular phenomenon, the terms do get used interchangeably, and I will be using them as such for this one post.)
There was a tiktok I saw a couple days ago that my partner also saw and we had a nice discussion about. I can't find it again, but fundamentally it boiled down to how a lot of cishet men don't see a relationship as one between a man and a woman, but a man and an object, and much of their homophobia comes from a lens of "How can you have a relationship without an object" and "how can you have a relationship between only objects?"1 (See the violent fear mlm men will harass them being rooted in "How can they treat men like objects?" and sapphic love is treated as lesser because cishet men see it as "you can't have a real relationship just two objects.")
Trans and nonbinary folk also get hit with this in different ways,2 as much of the hatred cishet men show towards us can be rooted in "Is this a man or an object?" because we don't fit neatly into their internal classifications - after all, if someone can change from being a man or an object, that implies that it's not about objects, but about people, and that could risk making them think about how they treat women.
Then, falling asleep last night and thinking over the conversation, I realize queer people often repeat this thought process. We just treat bottoms like objects instead.
I'm sure you've seen the memes. The "Look at you, you're just a bottom" with a dismissive photo attached, or the conflation of bottom with being submissive and therefore weaker, or hell the conflation of submission with weakness.3 These also get conflated with femininity in a negative way, with people assuming the smaller member of a gay couple is the bottom or in a relationship between a butch and a femme assume the femme is submissive and in relationships between enbies people often assume power dynamic based on perception of masculinity/femininity (see also in general "Who wears the pants in the relationship?" type quests that are always gross.)
And just...why?
After trying so hard to reject so much of cishet normative society, why do so many of us turn around and recreate a microcosm of it by talking about bottoms as if they're lesser? Like, of course when the speaker and the listener have both discussed this and the bottom has consented to being treated that way, feel free to degrade the bottom until they're all worked up, but that's the kind of thing that happens with negotiation and discussion. But when it gets put onto other people without consent, it just replicates the same harmful mentalities. Not to mention that we keep forcing it to be a binary, ignoring switches and verses.
Don't believe me?
Stop me if you've heard this one before. "You're not a switch, you're a bottom that will top to make your partner happy."4
Yeah. And I know people who that is true for. One of my exes proudly used that phrase to describe its own switch side, and I know a lot of switches who happily lean into that. And that's fine for them. But I'm a switch, by which I mean I will domme happily 95% of the time and am a full on slut who will domme anyone who I find attractive and consents to it...but 5% of the time it's nice to experience the other side of things. It also takes an incredible amount of trust for me to even consider switching, something I'll only do in the context of a committed relationship or incredibly deep friendship and even then it'll take months before I'm comfortable enough to do it.
Do I have a point or call to action with this?
Not really. Just wanted to vent about a trend that's always made me feel a bit icky.
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I know this is not the sole cause of homophobia/transphobia, but it had enough of a ring of truth to warrant a discussion imo.
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Of course we do.
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I'm a sadist. If I ever, ever were to assume my masochistic play partners were weak, I can look at their backside for solid proof they have incredible strength to endure that.
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You were supposed to stop me.