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For those of you who aren't aware, or may have never even heard of the term, "heteronormativity" is the idea the heterosexuality is the only "normal" sexuality, and everything else is to be estranged. Y'know, boys should be with girls, no two of the same sex should be together because "that's forbidden love!", etc.

I ask this because, as a homosexual, I've seen a lot of examples about liking the opposite sex makes you seem like you belong, but at the same time knowing or unknowingly proving that those who don't, or can't feel the same can't be "normal" in any aspect.

Some examples include the usual downvoting of anything that has a homosexual vibe to it, simply because it doesn't appeal to those of the same sex. A few of you have seen this example around here, I'm sure, but it's also pretty apparent in most other websites. More attention is given to the female form, while the male form seems to be downright heretical to even mention.

Posting a picture of straight up boobs in your face is acceptable, but the second you see a nice piece of man hunk oooooooh suddenly you've gone too far.

Another example would be some of the blatant hypocrisy in applying the reversed effect to something that would still be considered homosexual, but would still receive praise purely because it appeals to the viewer. Which of course is okay, but it's still a pretty big double standard.
I.E. heterosexual viewers can find homosexual material (male or female depending on preference) just as erotic, but only find homosexual material appealing when it's of the opposite sex. Such as girls who are into yaoi, and guys who are into yuri.

Now, my boyfriend, who is bisexual, used Monster Musume as a big and constant example about this topic when I talked to him about it. He claims that while it's mostly about the _tit_ular aspect (living life with a bunch of monster girls), he also claims that the show and it's blatant sexualizations of the characters are really, really sexist towards the male gender, and consequently very much towards the male homosexual audience. I agreed, and provided him, as well as a few others, with some of my own hypotheses. I told them that "if you were to replace the cast with a genderswapped version, the public would just view it as more 'weird, furry trash". I have more thoughts on the show but I'd be rambling if I were to continue.

Of course the real world has examples of this as well. Boys should act like boys and girls should act like girls. Even more double standards apply here, such as berating a gay man about not being "gay enough". Y'know, not wearing pink all the time and answering the phone with "Haaaayyyyy.". The whole "lesbians are totally hot but two dudes is just gross" applies as well.

Thankfully, more and more of our culture is slowly progressing out of how much heteronormativity there is, and has started to depict homosexuals in many media as regular people, but there are still very many who are only continuing to pull it back where it was before.

So, dear KYMers, straight or otherwise, tell me your thoughts about all this. It's kind of a big issue for me and other non-heterosexuals of my like. Of course we want to fit in, but we don't want to lose ourselves in the crowd.

TD;LR: Apparently being straight is the only way to be "normal", because, well, the idea of straight being normal is literally everywhere. But how much is "everywhere"? Thoughts pls.

I am bisexual (I am probably more along the lines of Pan or Omni sexual but I have my reasons)

I understand that people will assume I am straight till I tell them otherwise mostly because statistically speaking that random guy on the street is probably more likely straight than anything else. I have gotten over it.

I do think it is a little hypocritical the hatred Yaoi can get even when it is basically just a gender-swapped version of Yuri. As in If I have a shipping of two female characters that are not comparable, both are boring, and lack any form of personality or development at all, it gets a green light. But reverse the genders and it is wrong and disgusting.
Though I understand it is sexual preference.

What is strange though is when a Good Male Character is just presented alone males seem more willing to lean away from their "ridged straightness" attitude. Two characters I see this happening a lot with is Garrus from mass effect, and Asriel from Undertale.

Both seem to attract straight men into wanting to "go gay" for them, however if you ship them with any other male people tend to write it off as disgusting (with a few exceptions of course). However with female characters, they seem to go with "more women the better".

Well, culture definitely plays a part, and thankfully things have gotten more "inclusive" (for example, a couple in a commercial will be gay every once in a while.)
One of the worst offenders WAS video games. The original Sims, Mass Effect 1, and all but the more recent Harvest Moon games (well, sorta, this last one's complicated) were all about fictional people in fictional worlds, and would have taken less work to smooth out any bumps by allowing either gender to romance a character, rather than something like good localization. I also love the fact that it was Mass Effect 3 that had the gay controversy, not mass effect 2 (where dude on dude wasn't an option but female on boobed alien was).
I just hope this topic doesn't turn into a sh!tstorm. Implying that gay people are treated at all differently (even if it's not in an earth-shattering way) seems to be a touchy subject for some users.

I don't think it's as prevalent as you make it out to be. If anything, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure proves that heterosexual men can thoroughly enjoy big hunky men. Not to mention bara seems to be a popular thing right now.

I'm confused how your friend may the leap that intentionally understated male protagonist in a heterosexual harem anime is sexist towards homosexuals. The intention of his character design is that he is a very subdued and 'normal' kinda guy because everyone around him is very strange and alien, thus he plays the part of a regular Joe reacting to all around him. He's not supposed to be the eye candy of the show in any way. I'd say the same thing about any harem anime or visual novel starring a female protagonist, (there's one on steam right now with a bunch of incubi characters) they're not the ones being sexualized because it's not intended.

I think that people who think like that probably think that homosexuality is a disease,that homosexuals just want to become women (by that logic lesbians want to become men,but normally they don't beat an eye ).
Why this happens? Well I could blame gender roles(regarding who we have to date /marry) that we got enforced either by religion or law throughout the ages

Regarding your question this happens everywhere, but it is diffrent depending which country you are taking about.

I mean, the thing is this.

As much as it's not fun to say it, being heterosexual is normal, by the strictest sense of the word. Most people are heterosexual, so it is safe to guess that people are likely going to be heterosexual. That's the reason why people "assume" people are heterosexual first because it's just the most common option.

It's not like it's wrong to assume someone speaks English because they live in the US despite the fact that they realistically could speak anything, for example.

Now it is true that people act like homosexuality is weird but that's more of a problem of homosexuality being seen as weird rather than heterosexuality being "too normal". Honestly I don't really see why people drag that shit into it because people act weird around gays because they're gay, not because they're not straight – most people are pretty indifferent to people who are asexual (unless they're the jackass "why don't you like sex?" type, but that's not even comparable).

Ultimately I don't really have a problem with people assuming that heterosexuality is normal because it is the most common sexuality and thus you're most likely to assume right. But what's wrong is when people don't accept homosexuality as a viable alternative. At the end of the day it's kind of like assuming your child is going to be cisgender since most times you're going to be right about it anyways.

You say you want to fit in to a crowd but to be honest you're not going to fit into the "heterosexual" crowd. The good news is though is that people join together for more reasons than their sexual orientation – you're not going to fit into the heterosexual crowd but you're going to fit in a myriad of others, which will have you interacting with almost everyone. Most people who aren't outright homophobic aren't going to care about your sexual orientation since most people are only interested in that when they're interested in relationships. The thing is that we don't have to focus on our sexual orientation and while that group of people may not understand the problems that come with being homosexual, they can empathize with many other parts of the human experience.

For those of you who aren’t aware, or may have never even heard of the term, “heteronormativity” is the idea the heterosexuality is the only “normal” sexuality, and everything else is to be estranged. Y’know, boys should be with girls, no two of the same sex should be together because “that’s forbidden love!”, etc.

Society constantly changing. What's consider normal one century, is forbidden another. That's humanity for you. Humans are a social species and heavily rely what the vast majority of people consider, the "norm". If some do not conform with the "norm", they have the chance of being socially isolated. As a social species, that is a no-no. Hundreds and even thousands of years ago, homosexuality was, well, normal. Native Americans didn't mind them nor did Greece and Rome. Few centuries later, in Europe, it was consider bad for some unknown reason. Probably due to an influential human being dislike for them and people rallied behind them. So, it became widespread. And if you speak out, well, just look what happens when you try to speak out today. You get attacked verbally or even physically.

Posting a picture of straight up boobs in your face is acceptable, but the second you see a nice piece of man hunk oooooooh suddenly you’ve gone too far.

The world is pretty much run by heterosexual men. I think everyone should know that. Society still has mentality of "men are better than women", so we tend to treat women as sexual entertainment and such.

Another example would be some of the blatant hypocrisy in applying the reversed effect to something that would still be considered homosexual, but would still receive praise purely because it appeals to the viewer. Which of course is okay, but it’s still a pretty big double standard.
I.E. heterosexual viewers can find homosexual material (male or female depending on preference) just as erotic, but only find homosexual material appealing when it’s of the opposite sex. Such as girls who are into yaoi, and guys who are into yuri.

That, my dear friend, is fetishization. Unfortunately, we do that with a lot of stuff. Even race have that issue. My God, porn sites have ebony, latino, and asain only sections on their sites… N-not that I would know!

Of course the real world has examples of this as well. Boys should act like boys and girls should act like girls. Even more double standards apply here, such as berating a gay man about not being “gay enough”. Y’know, not wearing pink all the time and answering the phone with “Haaaayyyyy.”.

Again, another societal thing with gender roles and such. Also, fun fact, pink used to be a masculine color. Seriously, google it.

Society is always going to end up pissing some majority or minority off. It's been that way for thousands of years. Even when we finally manage to make one thing socially acceptable, there's a thousand others that want the same right. Just an endless cycle of "This is normal, that isn't" and "I'm right, you're wrong".

If you want to know my view on the whole thing, it's that I don't care. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, whatever. It just doesn't matter to me. I have issues on my own that I need to deal with. I don't need to give myself a hernia, because I disagree on who you're attracted to. Just, do whatever. Have fun.

I don't see why this is a thing, personally, I feel that there is one person out there that, regardless of your sexuality, if they offered to have sex with you, you would say yes, applies to me as well

I think heteronormativity is most obvious when people complain about homosexuality being shoved in their face every time a homosexual character appears in any form of media despite the fact that heterosexuality appears in almost every book or movie ever made. Or when they insist that there needs to be a reason for a character to be gay or bisexual or asexual when they wouldn't need a reason for that character to be straight. There are plenty of other examples in real life as opposed to media but I don't have time to explain all that right now.

{ More attention is given to the female form, while the male form seems to be downright heretical to even mention. }

Because the majority voting on the internet are straight men.

{ I told them that “if you were to replace the cast with a genderswapped version, the public would just view it as more ’weird, furry trash”. }

The genderswapped version of MM is all the bad rape reverse-harem anime we get, because straight men know that women want "bad boys" who will abuse them and call them bitches to their face, which is really really sexist toward the female gender imo.

{ The whole “lesbians are totally hot but two dudes is just gross” applies as well. }

If you ask straight men…

I think you have more of a problem with straight men being the obvious majority than straightness in general, but straight men are never going to act like gay men. They're not going to upvote softcore dick pics over titty shots or jerk off to gay porn in addition to lesbians. That doesn't mean they're making a statement that gays are abnormal and should go die or whatever.

Is there any more reason for a straight guy to upvote gay stuff than for a liberal to upvote conservative stuff?

Majority people are straight, so… yea… being straight is normal, and anything else is weird.

The rest of what you said I don't really get.
>*The whole “lesbians are totally hot but two dudes is just gross” applies as well.*

How is it weird that a straight guy is attracted to lesbians and not gay guys? I'm very confused by your assertion.

@lisalombs
I think a problem is people act like bisexuality doesn't even exist. You either like men or women. Or, even worse, when people think bisexual means you like all men and all women.

Your kinda asking people to use their left hand as a dominant hand in order to stop right-hand-normative behavior. It's not something I think many would fancy doing.

Also, what's wrong with being weird? You brought up monster musume aa an example of this heteronormative behavior, but that's a weird ass show from a normal persons point of view, as is getting any sort of arousal from drawings and 2d images. Normative is something most people just use as a statistical gauge for judging situations, but outside of that it has little impact.

The truth is, if you're on the internet, you're pretty much just a weirdo to begin with, and probably do not fit the mold of normative behavior. Simple as that, but, it's varying degrees of weirdness that compose the scale of internet users, and truth be told being homosexual on the internet is a lot less weird for many then, say, being a furry or even being into monster musume, since there would be many who'd call you weebo furry trash for such an opinion.

Point is, instead of trying to change what is normal, you should work to make your weirdness fun. You'll fit in a lot more if your not trying to change everyone elses preferences to fit your own tbt.

My only problem with this when someone makes a homosexual (or otherwise minority character) and 50 different friggen news articles about it show up. We get it, you're so progressive, you want a trophy.

Anyways.

"Another example would be some of the blatant hypocrisy in applying the reversed effect to something that would still be considered homosexual, but would still receive praise purely because it appeals to the viewer. Which of course is okay, but it’s still a pretty big double standard.
I.E. heterosexual viewers can find homosexual material (male or female depending on preference) just as erotic, but only find homosexual material appealing when it’s of the opposite sex. Such as girls who are into yaoi, and guys who are into yuri."

I personally fail to see how this is an issue. Of course people have their preferences, and not liking something isn't inherently a bad thing, so long as you handle it in a mature and responsible manner. I.E. I don't like MLP, but I just ignore it instead of making posts about how awful I think it is, or whatever.

"If you want to know my view on the whole thing, it’s that I don’t care. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, whatever. It just doesn’t matter to me. I have issues on my own that I need to deal with. I don’t need to give myself a hernia, because I disagree on who you’re attracted to. Just, do whatever. Have fun."

Pretty much how I try to handle everything.

I find it kinda funny to get bent out of shape for people having a different preference from you and expressing that preference in a way you don't appreciate. When that's the entire crux of what the assholes who want to go against LGBTETC believe.

Well, it depends on which definition of "normal" you mean.
On the one hand normal can refer to something that occurs frequently, statistically speaking, in which case heterosexuality meets that criteria.
On the other hand, normal may also refer to something that occurs naturally and is not detrimental to one's health. For example, a height of 5'6" is within the range of normal heights for full grown healthy men, even if that is pretty short. So in this definition, both heterosexuality and homosexuality (and bisexuality and so on) are normal.

I think a better term to use would be "status quo".

Here's something to keep in mind: "society" is just a word people invented to describe something that's actually made up of a shit ton of folks, all with varying beliefs and attitudes on about every topic imaginable. So if "society" is projecting that a certain attribute is normal, I'd say by far the most likely explanation is that it's just the combined force of a large majority of people who see it that way because it matches up with their life. There's pretty much always going to be many more love stories about straight couples than gay couples, along with more titillation intended for straight people then gay people. It's just a numbers game. In fact, it would be very baffling if that wasn't the case.

If a society were merely a lot of people, then there would be no way to observe trends that differ across time and geography. There would be no reason to have a government, or multiple governments. There would be no way to understand inequality or power, no way to understand how values are instilled on the young or how popular narratives are formed. There is far more to be said about society than that it's only the sum of a lot of individuals. In fact, without the phenomena of societies there would be no such thing as memes.

"If a society were merely a lot of people, then there would be no way to observe trends that differ across time and geography. There would be no reason to have a government, or multiple governments."
Uh… what? How? Hell, I didn't even say this.
And yes, it is in fact just a lot of people connected by some degree of closeness and organization (and not even that if you're talking about the "global society".) That is, unless there was some kind of brain chip that connects everyone in a society together that I wasn't aware of.
"There would be no way to understand inequality or power, no way to understand how values are instilled on the young or how popular narratives are formed."
This has nothing to do with defining the word "society".

I don't think people should try to change their language or entertainment to fit every group and I've accepted that. Like I'm really fuckin weird on the sexuality spectrum, I'm a girl with a penis who's a lesbian but only for girls with vaginas and at the moment I have no interest in romance. I don't expect everyone to change their sentences to always make an exception for people like me. Like if someone said "girls have vaginas" I wouldn't be upset in the slightest it's like when you say "people have 2 arms" which is also not always true but trying to make exceptions for everything is irrational.

Same goes for entertainment, like I'd love some more representation, but I'd rather it not be forced and for it to actually be proportional (unless the specific work of fiction has a factor that makes that kind of person more common)

Like people have said heterosexuality is "normal" in every sense of the word. As long as people acknowledge differences in the spectrum exist and accept them I don't care how they word it or what they enjoy personally. Like I really don't like the point about gay male porn and ships being ignored or downvoted, that's a demographic issue, if someone doesn't like it do you really expect them to upvote it or whatever for "equality" like lisa brought up it's the equivalent of upvoting opinions you hate. It's just oftentimes especially online most of the people you meet are straight males so expect to see such.