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Last year, a particular How to Do It letter alternately bemused and outraged large swaths of the internet, particularly the Ben Shapiros of the world, who saw it is a perfect analog for the “crazy left” (never mind that the crazy left ripped on the poor writer, too). The letter, “I’m a Heterosexual Woman Who’s Politically Opposed to Heterosexuality,” went something like this: “I’m a cis woman in kind of a classic millennial sex pickle: I’m really repelled by heterosexuality politically and personally, but I’m also really into dick. I’ve been thinking maybe I should look for bi dudes/ bicurious gay dudes, but I am not sure how best to do that. Rich, what would you think of a woman being on Grindr or Scruff?”
Well, it turns out this young woman saw all those comments. Oof. She has written in with an update:
“Just wanted to say thanks for your and the commentariat’s feedback on my ‘I’m straight, but I don’t want to be!’ nonsense letter from last year. It was hard to see through the shame spiral for a bit, but ultimately I was able to acknowledge that everyone was completely right: I had/have deep issues with gender and sex that I wasn’t dealing with, I was looking to use someone else’s identity to solve those issues for me, and that’s a shitty thing to do. So, good point and point taken!
It’s a rough experience to realize that you have offered up an ugly and very immature part of yourself for online dissection, but it was an experience I think I needed to have. Thank you too for the generosity and empathy expressed in your letter response—it would have been easy and completely justifiable to have just mocked my letter mercilessly and called it a day, but it really helped me that you didn’t.”
LIVE AND LEARN, EVERYONE. Let us be a little nicer to letter writers in 2021. Here are the latest columns:
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