Dating from the Margins: “She’s Kind of Insecure,” or the Catch-22 of Marginalization

This post is part of an informal series on dating as a marginalized queer identity. The focus will inevitably be shaped by my personal experience – being white, a trans woman, fat, poor, polyamorous, and a survivor of sexual violence and abuse – but I hope it will resonate to some degree with whose experiences aren’t similar to mine but who nonetheless feel marginalized by their communities. These posts arose from conversations with a number of people on various points of the continuum of queer cultural desire, and I am deeply grateful for those folks. They give me hope these conversations can happen more often, and on a much larger scale.

The first part of the series is available here: Dating from the Margins: Desexualizing and Cultural Abuse

On many occasions I have heard a friend or acquaintance dismissing a potential date because they’re “insecure,” “too needy,” or seem “more invested.” In polyamorous communities I have often noticed alarm if the person dates fewer people, or doesn’t seem to have much dating history. These value judgements are rarely if ever accompanied by any further analysis, though, and seem to be almost universally accepted as reasons to not date someone.

I have trouble accepting this conventional wisdom for many reasons. At its base this kind of thinking assumes a model of equal access to dating and desirability, which is demonstrably false. Further, it ignores any awareness of oppression models and privilege, and instead works to support those privileged by this model by making neutral these judgements which are nonetheless strongly informed by external cultural biases.

In my last post I presented the idea of systemic desexualizing as cultural abuse, and I stand by that. Especially if one identifies as a proponent of social justice, and of equality in the face of cultural prejudices regarding race, disability, queerness, body type, gender identity, etc., the understanding of the impact of desexualizing and denying desirability is of paramount importance to dismantle oppression. I cannot imagine describing the systemic denial of food, or sleep, or shelter to be dismissed as unchangeably innate and apart from oppression models, yet we do this with desirability all the time.

When I hear someone say their rationale for not dating someone is because of their “insecurity,” or some other easy pop psychology reasoning, I always hope they’ll have a flash of understanding and compassion, and say, “Though I imagine their insecurity might stem from a set of cultural oppressions which I can’t begin to imagine.” We cannot expect progressive social models to ever take hold if we accept the denial of an arbitrarily defined subset of people to the basic right to access love and sexual expression. This zero-sum thinking is the essence of capitalism, and encourages us to hold tight our own privileges while denying the exclusion of others.

When we stigmatize the symptoms of cultural abuse and marginalization (which is what most of the described “insecurity” is), especially in relationships where that same cultural abuse and marginalization privileges us, we are agents for that system of oppression. To identify ourselves as proponents of anti-oppression yet still engage in language and attitudes which apply negative value judgements to people without acknowledgement of the roots of those judgements undermines the very point of anti-oppression activism. It denies the impact of that abuse.

While we imagine ourselves capable of dismantling such oppressive systems as capitalism, sexism, racism, and classism, I find it deeply sad that we are unwilling to commit resources to the dismantling of desexualizing and exclusionary desirability. This is the truly revolutionary, and the truly radical.