The horrors of Personals

Personals really kick the shit out of one’s self esteem. I spent the latter part of the evening surfing various personals sites desperately seeking Miss Femme.

First of all, they ask for various pieces of information, like race.

Now, I’m biracial, and I like to be upfront about that. If I were to check the box saying I was European, well, I might end up with some racist bitch who hates Aboriginals. But on the other hand, I feel like a liar just saying Aboriginal (which by the way, none of the sites have, it always has American Indian, which is wrong on so many levels.) because I’m a pale little chickie and I feel way more comfortable choosing the middle ground where I actually live. However, a surprising number of personal sites don’t allow for choosing more than one race. Pick one dammit! It’s a sad reflection of society today.

Secondly, gender. I choose to live in a female body and be masculine, and I’d much rather choose a box marked Other than female or male.

Thirdly, I’m butch, no matter what my mother tries to tell me (or other obnoxious straight people for that matter who automatically think butch means ugly), and I like femmes. I feel most at home in butch-femme relationships. To me, an option for “I am a butch seeking a femme” seems like a given in a dyke personals site. And there are some (one) site specifically for that, but as far as I can tell there are no people from Saskatoon there.

Yes, it looks like I will never find a girlfriend. And besides that, how the hell do you screen for people who are bipolar friendly? As soon as you tell someone you have a pretty damned heavy duty mental illness, they run screaming for the hills. But to not tell someone, that’s even worse, because why have a lover who you can’t tell everything to?

I’ve been told my standards are too high (ie, more obnoxious straight people who don’t recognize the fact that a gorgeous femme would be attracted to an equally gorgeous butch), but when I think about certain past lovers, I recognize that at numerous times I threw my standards out the window, mostly involving staying with abusive partners until friends told me I was scraping the bottom of the barrel.

And then there’s the section for weight. Yeah, I’m fat. But how do you word that. “a few extra pounds (like twenty or thirty? Who decides how many is a few? Is it only ten?)’ I don’t like putting in heavy, I dunno, maybe it’s my own internalized fat-phobia. Maybe it’s because I am big but it looks really good on me. I dunno.

All this and I truly think it’s an exercise in futility. I’ve really tried to stop being lesbian the past year, in the hopes that at least I could find some comfort with some warm body, but dammit, men just bore me sexually.

Maybe I’ll just have to get famous and find some star struck woman.