Why Am I Checking?

On TikTok lesbian discourse which boils the blood and dulls the mind

Alone in the dining hall of the Midwestern school that I’m a Graduate student at and there are no empty tables. White boys are clotted and clogging up the works, heavy on the macros today, they are saying, and scooping and scooping cochinita pibil into their clean and empty bowls. Girls with ducked and nodding heads picking at open faced sandwiches with laptops open to blank pages. I find a table between tables and slide in, drop my things. I sit to eat. Next to me, and after a while, a table opens. Two workers come to sit and eat, their afros molded to the shape of their hair nets. They push in their chairs when they finish.

Fresh off a Critical Race Theory class, I’m thinking this is no world of mine. I have a choice, as every girl eating alone has- book or phone. The book I have on hand is Butch is a Noun by S. Bear Bergman. A wonderful collection of essays on gender identity, but a signal, also, to passersby that I’m more different than they think I am, and they already thought I was quite different. The phone then, to bite off one of my allotted chunks of daily social media consumption. Here, at the beginning, is a video of a girl.

No one talks about how isolating it is to be a lesbian, even within the queer community, she is saying. O, algorithm, my enemy, my intimate, my mindreader.

There is this literal straight cisgendered man on here, talking out of his ass about lesbians in such a derogatory way, and there are bisexual women in the comments hyping him up. Here she sounds as indignant as I feel. I notice that she has a slight accent which elongates words like “off” into “awf”. The video is in 2x speed. I listen without watching, pick at my jasmine rice.

He's going off about how lesbians are the worst and meanest people in the world when they only wanna date other lesbians.

Now I’m thinking of Bergman, and then of Feinberg. I dig into the comments to see if I can find said man and do. He’s Black, to my disappointment. Each video has more comments than it does likes, always a sign of discourse. I scroll deeper. Here he is playing with the straps of a durag loose on his head. His speech slurs in a way that I usually find endearing. Here he is paraphrasing a comment, saying “How can I say with certainty that lesbians move through the world…” but he lisps on the word “with”, and combines “with” with “certainty”, which makes me imagine him as a boy, battling against this strange and lilting pattern of speech. Did they bully him? I don’t have to imagine what he looked like as a boy, he’s posted a photo dump and the cover image is him as a child which he has pinned, which is his most viewed video, one of him as a child, yes, awkward with a boxy lineup and wide smiled and half shrugging in the passenger's seat of some car, but the the rest of the pictures are him now, him at golden hour in this same durag, handsome, grinning, sexy. One comment says no homo but u look pretty sexy here man.

Back in the video, he says that lesbians are not special. They do not have an experience unique to them that bisexual women cannot also experience. At this point I’ve hit my limit on screen time and get a black pop up which reads WHY AM I CHECKING? I click through and he comes back to me.

I don’t need to be a bisexual woman to say this. I don’t need to be a lesbian. I don’t even need to be a woman to tell you this. You know why? he says. Here I pause to write. What, I think, could he possibly be about to say.

I’m the big bad cis het man, he says. I am your oppressor. I marginalize y’all. You know what I’m sayin’? I’m the misogynist. I am the homophobe. The transphobe. The sexist. I’m all of that. And as the big bad cis het, I know y’all don’t have unique experiences from each other because in my patriarchal society, we don’t know the difference between y’all.

I think, as I scroll now, of all of the lesbians who placing their foot in the bear trap that he has set for them, myself included. I think of dark spots in the armpits of these women of which they are ashamed. I think of razor burn. I think of a girl in the mirror saying the word dyke over and over again with a smile, trying to get it to sound okay.

I am not going to explain why being bisexual is different from being a lesbian. I’m not going to address why, by attempting to ironically undermine his own social capital, he capitalizes upon it. I’m not going to respond to him, though I do have the urge and though I feel a crushing love for the dykes who did, and say you idiot, you idiot, I hate you and everyone like you. Instead I’m going to show you this;

me, fourteen, maybe, and on the bus home from school someday in spring. Damp with sweat and sticky and my afro matted to the back of my head because I did not know how to wash it and with my phone in my hand, the screen protector chipped as it is chipped now because some things do not change, angling it towards my poor best friend so that the video of Milo Yiannopoulos at some college’s podium playing under the glass glints a little in the sun and she has to squint at it.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Just watch,” I said. I don’t remember now what hate he was spewing. I was on a devil’s advocate kick, using my unfettered access to the internet not for porn, except sometimes for porn, but mostly to try to make sense of why some people thought that there was something wrong with me, something I could not fix. There must, I thought, be a reason. My poor friend grimaced as though she’d been hit and I felt a jolt of pride at being able to take it, whatever it was that he was puking up. I could take it. I could get a face full of poison and wipe my face clean enough to see clearly again, to cock my head and ask why do you feel that way? There was power in that, wasn’t there? Wasn’t there?

“Why are you watching this?” she asked me, and I smiled.