Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at

Quillett. Quillett is where free thought lives. We are an independent

grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

If you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to Colette.com and becoming a paid subscriber.

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articles and early access to Colette social events. And today we have a pair of

guests. Two women whom many listeners will recognize as hosts of the popular

podcast Feminine Chaos, Phoebe Maltz Bovey, who's based here in Toronto, and Cat Rosenfeld, who comes

to us from the New York City area.

Full disclosure, I've been looking to get this pair on the Colette Podcast for a while, and what

made me finally pick up the phone was their recent episode on Demisexuals, in which the pair analyze why so many teenage

girls and young women are inventing new and somewhat dubious variants of queer identity.

We're going to learn about what demisexualism is, including its early roots in online gaming and Tumblr culture.

We'll also discuss the larger question of why young apparently straight females are co-opting the mantle of victimhood that once was reserved for actual LGBT individuals, a phenomenon that some gay men and women now refer to as alphabet tourism.

Cat, Phoebe, thanks so much for joining us here at the Colette Podcast.

So I know of course what demysexuality is but I just want to make sure you know what it is.

It's when you take a sexuality and you split it in half.

So that's exactly what I thought it was.

I thought 50% sexual. How did it get such a weird and confusing name?

Okay, so yeah, I'm gonna jump on this being a something of a historian on the origins of demysexuality, culturally, conceptually, and linguistically.

So demysexuality, as it is in common use right now means to describe a sexual orientation, parentheses is not a

sexual orientation, but it is meant to describe a sexual orientation.

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