Yesterday’s story about the hilarious drama surrounding a lesbian bar in the Berkshire’s attempt to make medical face masks non-mandatory on its premises reminds me of an earlier long-running brouhaha where 1970s-style lesbian exclusivity finally foundered during the Great Awokening on the ideology of inclusivity and intersectional supremacy subscribed to by most lesbian intellectuals.
The white and fairly attractive founder of a lesbian bar in Greenfield, MA (near the Lesbian Triangle of Holyoke, Northampton, and Amherst) recently tried to increase business by dropping her bar’s rule that customers must wear anti-covid masks. (By the way, as a commenter asked, how do you drink while wearing a KN95 mask?) But she was denounced online by an individual wielding more Intersectionality points than the owner: a black person who claims to be a “gender-expansive lesbian” and uses “he/they” pronouns. (The complainant might or might not be a man — it’s hard to tell under the mask — but if this were a man, that would give him one more intersectional Pokemon point than the owner for being Trans.)
This lesbian vs. trans dispute has been going on for decades. Some lesbians have long tried to shut out men in skirts hitting on lesbians. Autogynephilic men who pretend to be women often think they deserve to have standard penis-in-vagina heterosexual sex with lesbian actual women. For lesbians to deny these neo-women the fulfillment of their erotic desires is, they argue, the deplorable crime they call the Cotton Ceiling. Wikipedia explains:
The cotton ceiling is a metaphor for the perceived marginalization or desexualization of trans women in queer erotic communities. It has been used to describe a “tendency by cisgender lesbians to outwardly include and support trans women, but draw the line at considering ever having sex with them.” The phrase is derived from the term glass ceiling, a description of how women can advance to a certain level in business but are supposedly held back from any further promotion or true seniority by sexism. …
Philosopher Amia Srinivasan describes the phrase—analogizing access to sex with workplace equality—as “deeply unfortunate”. “Yet”, she writes, “simply to say to a trans woman, or a disabled woman, or an Asian man, ‘No one is required to have sex with you,’ is to skate over something crucial. There is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to want what they want, but personal preferences [...] are rarely just personal.”
In other words, since the dogma among most lesbian intellectuals (other than Camille Paglia and a few TERFs) is that because everything is socially constructed and nothing is biologically “essentialist,” then a lesbian’s reluctance to drop her panties for a “trans-woman’s” “female penis” must be the result of our patriarchal society’s indoctrination of lesbians in something something something.
Whatever, the point is that the Cotton Ceiling must be deconstructed. After all, if you can’t believe a horny penis-having-person in a dress when he→she tells you he→ is officially a woman and therefore penis-in-vagina coitus would, in his→her case, be officially lesbian sex, who can you trust? (And if you have any girlfriends who might like to join in with us for an All Woman threesome, that would be even more subversive of patriarchal norms. I mean, well, it can’t hurt to ask). Note that he→she has more diversity Pokemon points than you do. You’re just a woman and a lesbian so you have only two points, while he’s a woman, a lesbian, and trans, so he has three Intersectional points. So it would be sexist, homophobic, and transphobic of you not to submit to his I mean her manly transly desires.
Criticism
The term gained wider attention in March 2012, when Planned Parenthood Toronto (PPT) hosted a workshop called, “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women”. The small group workshop was attended by seven people to discuss body image, shame and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs).
It attracted controversy from some feminists, who petitioned to cancel it. LGB Alliance co-founder Allison Bailey, a barrister, brought a discrimination claim against her barristers’ chambers after she was asked to remove a tweet accusing the workshop of “coaching heterosexual men who identify as lesbians on how they can coerce young lesbians into having sex with them...”.
PPT director Sarah Hobbs said that the workshop did not advocate for sexual coercion, and instead explored “the ways in which ideologies of transphobia and transmisogyny impact sexual desire”.
But this issue is not new. All this social constructionist logic was played out years ago at the …
Paywall here.
