re: some of your recent posting, I wonder sometimes if the fandom characterisation of Shane’s comphet maybe comes down to a lack of understanding of the comphet experience when you’re a full Kinsey-6-gay. I don’t want to imply that comphet is an exclusively homosexual experience but I do think it affects you differently if you don’t experience any heterosexual attraction at all. Like I see people saying Shane is traumatised or repulsed by his sexual experiences with women and while I don’t think it was fun for him I think if he was actually repulsed that might have made it easier for him to accept that he wasn’t attracted to women. But he just wasn’t into it the way he thought he should be even if he got off, so he was able to convince himself that there was a woman out there that he would be into like that. Idk this might be super incoherent but it’s one of the things I think RR got right in a way I don’t often see from people who haven’t experienced that specific brand of it themselves.
Yeah I wonder about this too. As usual anon: this got too long
I do think like, the road of "you don't get this because of X identity thing" is a slippery one---not trying to scold you or anything, anon, just describing my own thought process on this and stop myself from falling into easy explanations. That said, I do agree that there's a pretty specific set of comphet experiences that lesbian women have, and book!Shane at least has very lesbian comphet.
This is beside the point a bit, but I think comphet in general has gotten a little bastardized in recent years. I see people use it to describe otherwise gay individuals experiencing rare (and sometimes unwanted) heterosexual attraction. But that's really not what it originally meant. The original meaning was specific---women in particular are taught a life script they are expected to follow, and completion of this life script is a necessary prerequisite to succeed at womanhood. Gotta get a husband, have the kids, have the house. Any other version of life is failure. This happens even to straight women: Emma fucking Watson has talked about feeling like a failure for not having done this by 30. Shane appears to be feeling this kind of comphet. He knows he needs a wife for life script reasons, and is determined to make it happen.
But for lesbian women it also takes on a painful sexual aspect. It's completely normalized in our culture for women to not enjoy sex. So it can take a very long time for a woman to figure out that the sex she's having with men is not enjoyable for reasons of lack of attraction, rather than the guy just being bad at it, or women just not liking sex in general! Shane ALSO appears to have this kind of comphet, which is kinda crazy lol.
That doesn't mean that those experiences are repulsive or traumatizing in the acute sense of say, finding a loved one's body. More just....bad. Not good. Lack of attraction isn't the same thing as repulsion, and Shane even literally says he's not repulsed by sex with women (though of course he's not exactly a reliable narrator):
Lack of attraction is also harder to understand than repulsion. I think most of Shane's experiences with women were somewhere between boring, because he wasn't into it, and humiliating, because as a man he's confronted with the physical proof of his failure to perform heterosexuality properly. He probably also feels guilt about "making" women try to excite him even though it was always a lost cause! I don't think he self conceptualizes those experiences as trauma. I think he just shoves them in a box as soon as he's out to himself as gay.
The thing about Shane that connects his experiences back to that of a woman is that he's an athlete. He's very used to forcing his body into submission, he's used to enduring physical pain and humiliation for...reasons. So that he can be the best on the ice. So that he can fit into the social role that's been carved for him. As presented in HR that's a very female coded experience. Worth noting this is largely because Reid never lingers on Shane feeling a sense of physical strength or power as he moves through the world---this is the thing that changes a male athlete's experience from that of a woman subjugating her body to fit inside patriarchy. By glossing over Shane's reality that he could snap every person he meets in two like a twig, his internal world becomes much more feminine.
Anyway, this all said I do think Shane did a sort of chronic self harm. I've said it before but he basically ran conversion therapy on himself and I don't think in his head it was all that different to training for hockey. And I think that might hit him, eventually, and maybe he could get to a healthier place with processing it---but I think he'd have a hard time seeing this as anything other than something HE did to himself. In which case it's all still sort of his fault, right?
As for how it manifests, I do think that Shane's aversion to topping could be connected. I also think he would 1000 yard stare if Ilya ever suggested a threesome with a woman---mostly jealousy, but also like oh please don't make me do that baby.
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