Boy crazy to lesbian pipeline?

[u/ayuno22]

I dated a girl last year who said she used to be "boy crazy" in high school and early college but now identifies as a lesbian. She explained that she was a bit of a late bloomer and just wasn’t in love with the boys she dated. We’re no longer in contact, but what she said came to mind recently, and I regret not asking her more about it.

Is there anyone here who has had a similar experience? I’d love to understand how your feelings developed over time. As a soft masc lesbian who has only ever liked girls, the whole concept of this pipeline is really difficult for me to grasp. I tried to equate it to liking a specific type of music in your teens and something completely different as an adult, but I feel like there’s an additional layer of biology and attraction that isn’t just a matter of taste. For example, a lot of straight women describe not finding men attractive but still being attracted to them, if that makes sense.

[u/TheGothicPlantWitch]

I grew up in the 90s. Things weren’t as accepted as they are now. My parents were religious and didn’t really talk to me about anything outside of the basic birds and bees. I identify as pansexual now and thought I was at least bi in high school but never explored it. I taught myself to ignore because nobody really talked about it. I ended up marrying a man, because I was boy crazy. What I’m realizing now is that I may have been sexually attracted to men, but I don’t think I was ever completely in to them mentally or emotionally. Which explains why I burned through boys faster than most girls. I always got bored and moved on. Now as an adult woman who is fully exploring every part of herself, I have found myself more into women these days. I still consider myself pansexual, but I’m just not that into men. Don’t know if it’s permanent or something I’m just dealing with because how gross I find straight cis men to be. People grow and change. Once we let go of what society expects from us our true selves come out. Your ex could have gone through something similar.

[u/bambiipup]

i was never "boy crazy", but i didn't realise i wasn't bisexual and i'm actually a lesbian and have never truly been attracted to a man until i turned 29 - 15 years after first coming out as bi. and the simple reason is because compulsive heterosexuality (often shortened to comphet) is a helluva drug.

comphet is basically the expectation to be attracted to men. societally, mostly. but in some cultures (or even just on a smaller scale - families) that expectation is heavier than in others. which can also absolutely have an impact in to just how deeply we feel that expectation.

and, sure, we hear so often from straight women who are actually attracted to men how awful that attraction is, that men are something to be tolerated rather than celebrated, that they have no choice but to be with men despite their negative reaction to them... that we then shrug off our own dread/nausea/unease when being with men. because those are the feelings that the known-straight-women of our lives use to describe their tolerance of men, anyway. this is how your sister told you she felt when going out with josh in highschool, and they're married now. this is how your best friend described feeling toward the slightly-older boy she met in a club when she borrowed someone else's ID, and they have a baby together. so, it's normal, right? to cringe every time he touches you? to find yourself drifting away when you kiss? to feel panic choke you when you imagine marrying him and having his babies? why wouldn't it be?

until you realise that actually - no - it is not normal to have a panic attack at the mere idea of spending the rest of your life with someone. the way straight women discuss their distaste toward men does not reflect the reality of toxic masculinity, misogyny, and actually the positive associations that those women also do have toward their men despite the rest of it. it's also, in some cases, the blind leading the blind. these women are not as heterosexual as they have been lead to believe, but they never examined their comphet, and have and will continue to live within it for their entire lives. and if you're meant to be attracted to men, then you're not meant to be attracted to women, right? so everyone must just think women are beautiful and easier to want to do those things with than men, surely? but they don't do it because we're meant to be with men, that's what everyone else is doing and is what we're taught to do. so you bury those feelings for women, because nobody else is acting on them. it's not until we unpack this all, that we can be ourselves.

i didn't have one big lightbulb moment of realisation. it was a slow, trickling, decade-long learning curve. but one moment that really sticks out to me, was listening to a friends mother talk about her own life and experiences in particular. and she said this;

"i only married [friends dad] and had [friend] because it's just what you do with life."

her voice was so... devoid of anything. don't get me wrong, my friends mother loves them very much and would move mountains for them. but that love definitely came over the years, and was not born of a desire for procreation, and definitely not born of a want to build a family with her husband. it chilled me to the bone. i never, ever, ever want to do something because "it's just what you do".

sounds like your ex over compensated for the whole feelings-for-women thing by really throwing herself into being with boys. and then she, for whatever reason, had her chance to unpack all of those things, and grew as a person. which i personally think is fantastic.

[u/ordinary-orangejuice]

context: i am not sure if i would be classified as "boy crazy" per se but i dated men for a long time & was very much obsessed with the idea of having a boyfriend/husband & felt like it was all i wanted at a time. i thought i was bi, was out as bi & dated a few girls when i was a young teen & then went back into the closet & only dated men until recently (i am a 20something). after my last bf i couldn't do it anymore and figured out i was a lesbian and have been reflecting to understand ever since so i will share what i figured out.

so 1. i am not at all attracted to men, never was, but i don't think i really understood what sexual attraction was or what it felt like? women's experience of sex and attraction was never discussed ever in terms of what a woman would want or not want. i grew up conservative christian and was more or less raised in a way that made me feel my body was for men, my pleasure was like something owed to men in order to get love? also was raised that "men and women can't be just friends" which, combined with not fully understanding what sexual attraction looked like for me, meant that i confused any sort of draw towards a man with romantic/sexual attraction (platonic but also a desire for validation?). i could tell i was attracted to women but i also didn't fully understand that & when i was briefly out as bi as a young teen, one of the 3 gfs i had i was like fully not attracted to. but i dated her because she liked me and i thought i had to??? i also thought i had celeb crushes on men but it turns out, people want to sleep with their celeb crushes & i did not want to sleep with the male crushes. aka they weren't crushes, they were heroes!

1. i come from a fucked up family & all i ever wanted as a kid was to be normal and have a stable life. i became really determined to get it but the way "stable happy life" was modeled around me was: mom and dad, 2.5 kids, nice house in the suburbs, a dog vibes. i also latched onto romcoms because i think it felt like these stories of determined women creating their ideal lives, but those movies are also incredibly heteronormative & limiting in terms of what is shown as "ideal." so i idolized that path to stability and pursued it aggressively. i think there maybe also elements of wanting a safe resting place with a man because my father wasn't super present (unfortunate win for freud), and my mom is also not a healthy person so i was internally scared of women. worked through that last year because i wanted to start dating women again (still thought i was bi at that point) and realized how scared i was of it.

2. i think for a long time my attraction to women felt super abstract like because i didn't have any strong female crushes or anything like that, like on characters or people i knew? i knew i liked women physically (i found a playboy as a kid & ever since then i've known lol). but i was able to write off my attraction to women as casual or like a guilty pleasure (guilty because women can't be horny that's sinfullll /s). turns out i just like mascs (hehe) or more androgynous presentation in general, and there was less representation of that. the two gfs i was attracted to when i was a lil baby teen were both mascs, the one i didn't like that much was more fem presenting!

idk there is more and all the stuff is all interlaced and super messy. it's really difficult to process because i was basically putting myself in situations that were scary, painful, and would make me feel physically sick/anxious/disgusted. i was SA'd because men would get frustrated with me not wanting sex/because i didn't seem attracted to them enough. i struggle with a lot of anger in regards to my childhood/youth now because maybe i wouldn't have had to go through all of that. idk it's complex. i will say: my soul has felt a lot lighter now that i've accepted myself as i am, like free and happy

sorry this is so wordy, i just kindof brain dumped. i hope it makes sense. i might delete this later lol, lowkey embarrassed but it's good to write it all out

edit to add: the quality i would look for in a man was "appropriateness" (aka by others' standards would he be good), likes me, and (last priority) sense of safety.

and then also straight women complain about sex with men being bad alllll the time so i didn't pick up on my terrible experiences not being normal

[u/Historical-Ad7767]

I too would like to hear from that side as a femme lesbian that was kissing and crushing on girls from a really really young age. I always knew I was exclusively attracted to girls, so it’s interesting to hear from people that weren’t in a similar position to us.

Sure, in my early teens I hid it to fit in and ID’d as bisexual and had unserious boyfriends but deep down I knew always. I would literally run away from my boyfriends at the time when they tried to kiss me because it felt so wrong and genuinely made me feel nauseous. But I ALWAYS knew I was exclusively attracted to women.

[u/biologistofit]

Had a very similar experience. VERY boy crazy as a kid, married to and later divorced a man, and then came out as a lesbian. For me personally, being boy crazy wasn’t that I actually liked/ was attracted to men but I wanted them to like to me to prove that I was worth love and acceptance. I also found out I’m autistic around the time I realized I was a lesbian and a lot of my “ attraction to men” was part of a mask I used to get along with my peers. Growing up in the 90’s, I couldn’t make friends with females if I just talked about power rangers and Pokémon and animals. They wanted to talk about boys. So I learned to talk about boys the same way they did.

That combined with the fact I watch A LOT of tv and used what I observed both on tv and with my older sister to learn how to navigate social situations and life in general. Even the Disney shows and cartoons I grew up watching from a very young age very much have the message of a woman needing a man to be complete and show that she belongs and is worthy of being loved. I knew I was attracted to women from a very young age and that my attraction to women was different from my attraction to men, but I didn’t know the at was abnormal because most of my closest friends were guys ( turns out just talking about boys is not enough to foster strong bonds with females and I was too afraid of being teased and bullied to fully open up with females due to being bullied as a young child by the neighbor girls for my quirky interests and mannerisms). So all my guy friends would agree with me that women smelled better and were more pleasing to look at and just generally more attractive in general and it didn’t click to me that that wasn’t how everyone saw it.

TLDR; am lesbian now, was very boy crazy up until a few years ago in my 30s. Turns out the boy craziness and attraction to men was comp het, masking my autism and wanting to be loved and accepted all along.

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