A picture of my teddy bear on a messy couch. Most of my blog posts
contain no images but only tedious collections of paragraphs, so I
wanted to add some vibrance to this one despite the irrelevance. I love
him. <3
Posted on August 19, 2025.
Love, like other feelings, is influential to our daily activities. It diverges from other feelings, like happiness or sorrow, in that it's often more intense and remarkable to our hearts. It's more often visible to our eyes, as represented within longer backstories. Have you ever heard of nostalgia stories, jealousy stories, or rage stories?
It's difficult to put love on concrete ground. I imagine it as a state of yearning toward a person because of an impression that person has left, one that feels welcoming and spreads the sense of security in their presence. Our past lived experiences should play a role to create that used-to-ness and safety. Likewise, attachment styles have often been connected to the attitudes of caregivers.
Love must be a combination of emotions, it can't be detached from them, and it certainly overlaps with them. Experiences lead to emotional responses, and we humans have tons of such responses. Our emotions are likely learned and instilled based on the context we live in. If in different cultures, the sense of hygiene ranges correspondingly, I don't see why we can't say the same for emotions.
If society told you who you can feel love to or implicitly exposed you to who's accepted of receiving your love, then it's likely you'll sustain this idea even later with obedience. Many ideas are instilled during childhood, and permanency of such ideas in the mind is debatable because such a question ties back to the mind's states of internalization, interpretation, and other unconscious processes.
Anyhow, the reality is that we've indeed been restricted in the scope of people we can love - we're living in heteronormative societies. Hence, love is not immune to pollution, especially by gender roles. I touch on heterosexuality and the experience of queer love under the patriarchy in this blog post.
When women's labor has been undervalued and unpaid throughout history and even today, women are situated below men, as sorted by their importance and value as human beings.
Under the expectation of having children, not only is a woman undergoing pregnancy for nine months facing so many risks and pain while a man only had to ejaculate once, she's also expected to take care of his children, calm down his raging self, and keep her beauty intact. This unequal share of responsibilities and expectations is rarely acknowledged and justified as her default tasks and something she's supposed to do.
A man, on the other hand, is rewarded for his work, though I admit somewhat unfairly. He's portrayed as a provider for and protector of women to hide the fact that he holds all the power. What really happens is a war between him and other men, where everyone is a threat to women.
Are we living in the 1900s? No, and women are now in the workplace too. At least, a level of financial independence has been established. What's still apparent is that women are still expected to take on childbirth and homemaking tasks, and misogyny in the workplace, social attitudes, and beauty standards still pose a burden on women.
Abortion is not easy to access everywhere, rape culture is alive, men are more likely to be perpetrators of any crime, and women are harrassed for not conforming to beauty standards. Forced marriages are there, queer people face marginalization, and domestic violence endures.
It's evident that the patriarchy exists, as a result of men holding more wealth and power, along with social conditionings forcing everyone into alignment with gender norms. Men are conditioned to believe that they are more powerful than women, that anyone who resembles women a tiny bit lies at the bottom of the male hierarchy (e.g. queer men), and that it's shameful not to be in their dominant position, not to be a man.
This is not to advocate for more women or non-binary people in leadership and wealth positions, by the way. Such a vision still constitutes a different kind of oppression - one that's not inherently a hierarchy of men over women but the extension of the patriarchal dominance model, where one (men) rules and others (women) obey and which is incomparably oppressive. Neither does it help female citizens and workers.
Intersectionality deserves an emphasis in this case. Realize how I can't pinpoint whether women in power are more oppressed than male citizens, who have relatively less power, but what's blatant is that these two groups of people have unique experiences of their own, and such a comparison is unworthy of declaration, as what we should aim for is dismantle all systems of power that grant privileges. What intersectionality provides is progress in our understanding of these power relations, which are a result of overlapping discriminations.
Race, gender, class, and sexual orientation are all impactful in combinations and complicit in people's oppressions. When the topic at hand is love, I thought it'd make the most sense to put weight on gender and sexual orientation, as touched on in depth in this entry.
When we consider the categories of men and women, whose expectations come with contrasting traits, heterosexuality is a powerful orientation to create the clash between these two identities and necessary to put the man-over-woman hierarchy into action.
Not only does heterosexuality pose an oppressive power dynamic, it's also very productive, since women and men constitute about two halves of a society's people. Anyone who deviates from the norm is punished by homophobia and transphobia, in addition.
In a society crowning masculinity while degrading femininity, it's expectable that straight men hang on to the desire of attaining power over women under the delusion of romantic love. Sexual offences are discarded as an expression of male desire toward women. Who are men, without servants to dominate, objectify, and flaunt their strength to while eroticizing this entire process of subordination? It's what men are conditioned into. It's what being a man is taught to be. It's a result of the patriarchy.
On another note, the contrasting definitions of men and women aren't factual but stereotypical, and they are spread within societies effectively owing to selective perception, leading people to focus on what's been told to be true to them while ignoring the outliers. Gender norms are so influential that they put people into alignment with their restrictions by encouragement and discouragement felt at the individual level and social punishment.
It's undeniable that gender socialization, to reproduce patriarchal power dynamics, has influenced people's sexual orientation, gender identity, and realization thereof. More people would've been gay, bisexual, or transgender if they were allowed to explore what's unthinkable of their identities and homophobia and transphobia weren't real.
It's likely that people's sexual orientations and gender identities tend to be established and fixed, as the internalization of gender norms, likely, is set the hardest in stone during childhood. Children tend to struggle with questioning gender norms, as cognitive skills have yet to develop then.
In this vision, the fluidity of identities depends on one's capability of exploration, and such a capability must've been enclosed to different extents in different people because of, once again, the internalization of gender norms, homophobia, and transphobia.
A picture of my teddy bear on a messy couch. Most of my blog posts
contain no images but only tedious collections of paragraphs, so I
wanted to add some vibrance to this one despite the irrelevance. I love
him. <3
Let's drop into the reality of a lesbian. She realizes she's romantically and sexually attracted to women. Maybe, she develops a crush on another woman like her. However, the entire world is against her existence and wishes. If she's a woman, how can she like another woman? Who's going to be the man of the relationship?
If she's luckier and has been raised in a more progressive country, her family might accept her. But that's only a "might" - we've yet to achieve full acceptance of queer people in any region. How about the woman she's longing for? What if she's homophobic or what if her family or space of friends is? If she's not attracted to her, which is acceptable in all cases of love regardless of the possibility of attraction, will she be harassed or marginalized?
Queer people can see that there are no "men" and "women" of their relationships, so they might as well stay away from replicating patriarchal power dynamics and heteronormative gender roles. Their non-conforming identities lead them to questioning what's expected of their gender.
Because queer love is resistant to the nuclear family, it's faced with intolerance and bigotry. It's the kind of love that persists against obstacles. While straight people's love is championed, celebrated with shiny balloony marriages, and romanticized like no tomorrow, queer love is censored, pushed into the fiery pits of hell, punished with an invalidation like a sin, "you must be confused," and poked fun at like a joke, a comedy scene.
Despite whatever tortures the queer, that sort of love finds its way to sparkle. They know what they're committed to is not a failure, not a fiction, not a wrongdoing despite what their coworkers say. Sometimes, it's difficult or impossible to cling on because the queer existence is not what families envisioned for them or the entirety of society was designed for. It has to resist the public eye and thrive behind closed doors, and the dystopic space, in which it resides, certainly hurts, but it's real, true, and completely, pure.
Societal receptions are off-putting, so let's try distancing ourselves from this painful overload of reality. LGBTQ+ people tend to be more accepting of their partners' feelings and actions, as they dance with their open minds.
Let him dye his hair pink, purple, and blue. Listen to their disappointment in society because employers detest their mannerisms. March as you hold hands in a pride parade, but be careful, don't let the rainbow pole slip off between your and her palms - it's sweaty in June.
Sleep knowing that only you can understand each other and counteract bigotry. Hold on to that comfort, connection, and shared solidarity. Come out of the closet again. Those norms can't trap and lock you inside, like they do with cishets.
Maybe, the positive framing of queer love here was a coping mechanism of mine under my homophobic family and society, but that doesn't take away from the intense experience and beauty of queer love. When things hurt badly, it feels better to adopt a positive outlook, but that's not to ignore or downplay so much abuse targeting the LGBTQ+ community.
So much is said here about queer people, straight men, and other realities I wish we could've lived in, sometimes in a negative manner, but don't worry. If you do unlearn the patriarchal conditioning you've been raised to conform to, pursue egalitarian power dynamics, and not enforce gender roles on your partner, I support your heterosexual relationship - if my sayings even matter to you. Can you have straight love as beautiful and bold as that of queer people? It's debatable, but I'd love to think so.