Tag Archives: sexuality

Ozy’s Current Theory of Gender

[As promised. I would like to acknowledge my debt here to West and Zimmerman's Doing Gender, to Natalie Reed, and to the valiant people who have attempted to explain to me what the fuck Judith Butler is going on about. Also, I'm not saying any of this is how it should work; I'm simply describing how, as far as I can tell, it does work.]

Our culture transmits to us a certain idea of How Gender Is Supposed to Work. Or, well, ideas. People of different races and classes and abilities and sexualities and religions and body types and personalities get different messages about how gender is supposed to work. You get different messages based on where you grew up, what your family’s like, where you went to school, what media you watched, who your friends were, whom you date, where you work. In fact, you can say that no two people get exactly the same gender socialization.

People use the cultural ideas of how gender works as a toolkit to express their own identities and to communicate them to other people. (For some people, gender is not a relevant axis on which they construct their identities. Thus you get cis by default people.) Ways that people express their gender can include clothing, grooming, hygiene, mannerisms, word choice and syntax, the way they pitch their voice, their lifestyle, sexual choices, how they interact with or treat other people, and probably half a dozen other things I can’t think of.

Because gender is a means of communicating facts about one’s identity, people “read” each other’s genders. People slot each other into “male” or “female,” and then into a multitude of gendered subcategories– butch, femme, good girl, slut, dandy, bro, geek, fag, et cetera I’m sure you can think of more. Of course, just because you’re trying to communicate something does not mean other people are able to understand what you’re trying to communicate (the jargon I hear is “illegible gender”); other people bring their own biases and interpretations and Mounds of Gendered Shit to the table.

People end up treating other people differently based on what gender they read the person as having. For instance, I mysteriously get much more respect in intellectual conversations when people read me as male or at least masculine. All this gets Really Important in relationship to sexuality, because for a lot of people what sex or gender they read their partner as is a fundamentally important aspect of attraction. And in turn what gendered subcategories they read their partner as fitting into affects whether they want a sexual relationship and what kind of sexual relationship they want.

People feel more comfortable expressing their genders in some ways than in other ways. In some ways, this is shaped by how people treat them: after all, there are plenty of women who look feminine to get guys without having much connection to femininity at all. But for a lot of people the act of expressing yourself in a certain gendered way feels right: putting on a skirt just feels ineffably better than sweatpants; it just feels right to swish; when you slick back your hair you look in the mirror and see you. I think that’s a lot of what people are getting at with “makeup is empowering!”– it’s not that makeup is empowering, it’s that expressing your gender is empowering, and for some people that involves makeup. (I predict about half my readers are nodding along going “yep” at this point and the other half are like “what the fuck is zie even talking about?” Sorry, other half. Please take it on faith that this Is A Thing I Promise.)

—As for the “hey, if that’s true, why can’t trans women just be men in makeup?” Because they feel comfortable as women, not men. Duh?

Why do people have feelings of gender comfort? Some kind of biopsychosocial nonsense, probably. I’d argue that there’s Probably Some Kind Of Neurobiological Thing Or Things That Affect One’s Gender Somehow, because both gender roles and trans people tend to pop up a lot cross-culturally, and because certainly from the inside it doesn’t feel like my bodily gender dysphoria is a product of the culture I grew up in. But I’m not going to say “it’s the prenatal hormones!” or “we have the brains of the opposite gender!” or anything specific. Wait for neuroscience to become more advanced.

As to the psychological and social factors… I only have one navel to gaze at, my own, so I’m not going to generalize about other people’s experiences. But I use gender-neutral pronouns and call myself “genderqueer” or “nonbinary” and wear a binder because I happened to encounter the trans community and fit my experiences into their framework of what genderqueer people do. I paint my nails and wear makeup because, shit, man, so did David Bowie and Billie Joe Armstrong. I cut my hair to look like Joan Jett and grew it out to look like every gamer guy who can’t be bothered to get a haircut. I’m perfectly fine fucking boys because of my formative experiences reading slash fic and lesbian feminist theory. (Which is kind of the opposite of what lesbian feminism was supposed to do, but c’est la vie.) I choose my outfits based on whether strangers “sir” me or sexually harass me. I joke that my gender identity is bishonen! Either “nature” or “nurture” is an inadequate explanation of how I got my gender: the answer is both.

(Also I really like this list from Natalie Reed’s Twitter of assorted factors that have to do with gender somehow. Gender is coooooomplicated.)

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Prudes’ Progress: Intro to Radical Feminism

Lisa Millbank is a blogger I really respect, because she’s really smart about gender and even when I disagree with her ideas I always have to question my beliefs. Recently, she finished a series called The Prudes’ Progress, which is about developing a radical feminist concept of sexuality and has induced Many of the Thinky Thoughts on my part. So I’ve decided to write a bunch of blog posts responding to it, or talking about the ideas that are more-or-less related to her thoughts. This is the introduction to the series!

First: Millbank is a radical feminist. Most people I know tend to use “radical feminist” as either a synonym for “extreme feminist” or a synonym for “transphobic whorephobic kinkphobic feminist,” neither of which are actually correct. Radical feminism is a distinct theoretical perspective on feminism (which, yes, often happens to be extreme and transphobic/whorephobic/kinkphobic).

Radical feminists believe that gender is a social construct, not a biological reality, formed out of patriarchy. Patriarchy, they believe, is a social structure in which men dominate and oppress women; it seeps into every aspect of our lives, including such apparently apolitical things as appearance and one’s sex life. Radical feminists believe that gender, structures of domination, and patriarchy are bad for women and should be eliminated. (For the curious, I disagree with #1 (gender is both a social construct and a biological reality), agree with #2, and agree with #3 except for the gender bit with caveats.)

In particular, since I’m going to be talking about radical feminist views of sexuality a lot, I should talk about what they are. If patriarchy seeps into every aspect of life, it also seeps into sex; since patriarchy is bad, this leads to sex that hurts one or more of the people involved. How so? Well, obviously sexual violence. But beyond that an ideology of beliefs that wind up promoting sexual violence (the famous “rape culture”)– the treatment of one person as active, powerful, the subject, the one who wants, and another as passive, subordinate, the object, the one who is wanted and does what the subject wants. Through sexuality, patriarchy eroticizes and actively maintains this difference. Lisa Millbank calls patriarchal sex “instrumental sexuality,” which is a phrase I’m going to use.

Radical feminism was originally opposed to liberal feminism, which was the feminism that mostly dealt with legal inequality and job discrimination and reproductive rights. Very few people identify as a liberal feminist anymore because the abortion thing is basically the only part of liberal feminism that’s remotely controversial and if you like abortion rights you can just call yourself pro-choice.

Around about the time liberal feminism became incredibly uncontroversial, feminism decided to have something called the Feminist Sex Wars (not kidding). Radical feminists tended to believe that porn, BDSM, and sex work perpetuate social structures of domination and were violence against women. Sex-positive feminists, on the other hand, were like “wait, no, I get to do what I want with my own vagina, stop telling me what to do.”

(Also in this period huge swathes of radical feminism inexplicably decided that trans people were Public Enemy #1. Which, okay, if you think gender is a product of the patriarchy then trans people probably won’t exist in the post-patriarchy, but I fail to understand how that turns harassing trans women into a feminist practice.)

(Yes I do. The answer is transmisogyny.)

A huge amount of theory that even sex-positive and trans feminists use was developed by radical feminists. The concept of “patriarchy”? Radical feminists. “Rape culture”? Radical feminists. “The personal is political”? Radical feminists. Consciousness-raising groups and their descendant the feminist blog? Radical feminists. I am really sad that radical feminism has all too often devolved into woman-hate, because there are so many radical feminist authors I respect and who have deeply affected my feminism and challenged my thought on gender. Part of the reason I like Millbank’s work a lot is that she’s a modern radical feminist who gives my brain the same workout as, say, Dworkin.

Another reason I particularly like The Prudes’ Progress is that a lot of people, having proved to their satisfaction that such-and-such sexual practice is inherently oppressive, consider their work done. To pick on a non-radical-feminist example… let’s say it’s oppressive to consider trans, disabled, and fat people inherently unattractive, both because it’s a product of a culture that considers trans, disabled, and fat people unattractive, and because it’s shitty to be considered ugly because you’re part of whatever marginalized group. Okay, great. What do you do with that? If you’re someone who’s only attracted to cis, abled, thin people, do you… have sex with trans, disabled, and fat people anyway for anti-oppression points? Self-flagellate about  your oppressive boner? What? Identifying a problem is not the same thing as offering a solution.

Millbank has written an entire really long series of articles about how, if you accept radical feminist beliefs about sexuality, to make your sexuality less patriarchal. I approve of this and wish more people who want to critique sexuality would do similar things.

Obvious Disclaimer: all of this is personal piety, not basic morality. Your moral obligation sexually is discharged by not being an asshole. (You know: don’t rape people, don’t call people ugly because they don’t give you a boner, don’t lie to your sexual partners about how many people you’re fucking or whether you have an STI, use contraception unless you’re prepared to have offspring, that sort of thing.) If you don’t accept radical feminist beliefs about sexuality (which I do with some caveats), you might be able to get something out of The Prudes’ Progress, but it’s primarily targeted at a different audience. If you’re in a place where working on your sexuality is not healthy or fulfilling or the optimal choice for you right now, great! Go build houses for Habitat for Humanity or something. If your feminism involves hating on women who aren’t hurting anyone for being insufficiently feminist, you are bad at feminism.

Further Obvious Disclaimer: The Prudes’ Progress is mostly written for women in erotic relationships with other women. I am a nonbinary but female-presenting person primarily in erotic relationships with men (although I have been in erotic relationships with women in the past). I expect this is going to affect my reactions to shit she talks about.

Probably Non-Obvious Disclaimer: Most of my planned blog posts range from “inspired by The Prudes’ Progress” to “completely unrelated to it but thrown in as an appendix because why not,” so you do not have to read The Prudes’ Progress in order to understand the series.

Sexuality Is Culturally Influenced

Okay, in this blog post I’m going to be talking about “nature” to mean “stuff that happens before you leave the womb, like genetics and epigenetics and womb environment and stuff” and “nurture” to mean “stuff that happens after you leave the womb, like your parents and who your friends are and The Patriarchy and stuff.” I realize this is vastly oversimplified and all the biologists and psychologists in the audience are tearing their hair out.

Given this definition: I think that the kinds of people one is sexually attracted to are primarily the result of nurture, not nature.

As the Internet has shown, people are attracted to a lot of really weird shit. I mean, there exist people who are sexually attracted to cartoon ponies. Lots of them. I find it extremely difficult to figure out how anything even vaguely nature-y would lead a physical attraction to cartoon ponies. Like, sure, you could maybe explain liking humanoid cartoons because they’re heavily caricatured and thus a superstimulus of traits you find attractive because of nature, but what the fuck kind of attractive trait is a cartoon pony stimulating? Mane color? So nurture definitely influences people’s sexuality at least some.

“Well,” you might say, “so a few weirdos have a sexuality that is pretty clearly nurture-related. But surely nurture wouldn’t affect, as a completely random example, an entire society for a thousand years!” To which I say: footbinding. To me– just like to any other modern American– footbinding is less attractive and more incredibly squicky body horror. But men wrote poems about the beauty of lotus feet; for a thousand years families crippled their daughters so they would be beautiful. I mean. That is serious commitment there. Your options here are “sexually is culturally influenced in an enormous way,” “for some reason Chinese people evolved to find footbinding beautiful and no one else did and they’ve mysteriously stopped in the past hundred years,” or “Chinese people spent a thousand years breaking their daughters’ feet for no reason.”

There is also more circumstantial evidence! What people are sexually attracted to changes very quickly. In the 1920s, women wore breast binders to flatten their chests; today, Ask Men heralds their hottest woman of 2012‘s cleavage and “obvious assets.” Within less than a century, in the same country, we went from an ideal woman who had A cups to an ideal woman with F cups, both of which presumably reflect the desires of the average man of the time equally well. (…Seriously? F cups? That poor woman.) Admittedly, while genetics can’t change that fast, some nature-y things could (hi epigenetics), so it isn’t perfect.

Also, people are often attracted to traits that offer no fitness-maximizing benefit at all. The Victorians fetishized the tragically beautiful woman dying of tuberculosis. It is difficult in the extreme to imagine how dying of tuberculosis maximizes one’s ability to have healthy offspring. Or if you want to get closer to home– look at the nigh-universal geek male thing for girls in glasses. Having eye trouble is not obviously fitness-maximizing; on the other hand, glasses are a common signal in Western culture for intelligence, so liking girls with glasses is a logical outgrowth of liking smart girls. Of course, there are a lot of things that are nature-influenced and not fitness-maximizing– genetic drift is a thing– so this is not conclusive evidence.

On the other hand, look at the most proverbially born this way kind of sexual attraction: homosexuality. Twin studies have shown that between 17% and 39% of one’s sexual orientation is explained by genetics. While womb environment (especially prenatal hormone levels), which falls into my “nature” category, is also hypothesized to have an effect, that’s not a great case for the Born This Way side.

So. Here is my Grand Theory of Sexual Attraction: what people are attracted to might be based partially on nature, especially for things like sexual orientation, but it is primarily a result of this miasma of individual psychology, peer group, media, porn, early sexual partners, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of that stuff is influenced by cultural artifacts such as the patriarchy and beauty constructs on a level that might be hard to see on an individual level but is clearly evident on a population level. Women’s attraction to socially dominant men is a result of patriarchy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad or fixable; it just is.

The Cotton Ceiling

About a year ago (yes, I’m very up on the news, in my defense I was doing other things at the time when this post was remotely relevant), there was a big flutter in the trans community about the “Cotton Ceiling.” Originally coined by transfeminist Drew DeVeaux, the Cotton Ceiling refers to how trans women are nominally accepted as women within queer communities, but treated as unfuckable and undesirable eunuchs when it comes to actually dating them.

(For the record: I’m a fairly masculine nonbinary trans person who was assigned female at birth and who almost exclusively dates and socializes outside the queer community.)

I am actually fairly sympathetic to a lot of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist critique (this is a fairly representative example) of the Cotton Ceiling. Because, yes, you should be allowed to say no to sex for any reason or no reason! “I don’t want to have sex with women with penises” is a perfectly valid reason not to have sex with someone! Facile “so you should have sex with any arbitrary trans woman you happen to come across” solutions to the Cotton Ceiling problem have the potential to get really nasty, social-pressure-y, and even coercive.

Where the trans-exclusionary radical feminists lose me is where they finish up the sentence “you should be allowed to refuse sex with people for any reason” with “NO LESBIAN WOULD EVER SLEEP WITH A TRANS WOMAN BECAUSE TRANS WOMEN ARE SECRETLY MALES AND NO TRUE LESBIAN FUCKS MALES.” Because that is, uh, treating trans women as undesirable and unfuckable eunuchs? Which is exactly what Drew DeVeaux was complaining about?

You have to be a very unique person to, in the course of arguing with someone, prove their argument correct.

I find it amazingly transmisogynistic that this conversation is happening about trans women. At this point, bottom surgery for trans women is much more advanced than bottom surgery for trans men is, and far more trans women get bottom surgery than trans men do. If you are not attracted to women who have penises or don’t have breasts, then there are lots of trans women you can fuck, while if you are not attracted to men with pussies, you’re going to be looking for a trans boyfriend for a long time. And yet trans women are considered unfuckable within the attracted-to-women queer community, while trans men are OMGTEHSEXY. Fucking transmisogynistic bullshit.

I’m really not sure if there’s a non-transphobic reason to choose not to date someone you’re otherwise attracted to just because they have a trans history. Maybe if you really value your partners being able to bear children? I dunno.

(Spare me the bullshit ‘socialization’ arguments. As if trans people get identical socializations to our cis counterparts. As if all cis women have identical gender socializations, regardless of race, class, religion, neurodivergence, ability, survivor status, region of the country, what their family was like, who they had as friends, what school they went to, or any other factor.)

Obviously, there are people who are repulsed by the mere fact of a woman being trans. (Or of a man or nonbinary being trans, of course.) And it is cissexist to do so. If you are attracted to women and really see trans women as women, you’ll consider the possibility of dating trans women who are attractive to you, the same way you’d consider dating any other group of women. Claiming that you won’t date any trans women, at all, ever, is a sign that you have some internal cissexism that you need to work on.

Ultimately, however, the Cotton Ceiling isn’t about fucking individual trans women; it’s about the community norms that treat trans women as unfuckable. (Here I want to link to Monica Maldonado’s excellent Hating Transsexual Bodies series, but unfortunately she took her site down.) The problem is acting like trans women just aren’t attractive or sexy at all; in fact, trans female bodies must be as much like cis female bodies as possible, or they’re gross gross gross forever! That is wrong.

I think it’s important here to point out that the toxic, transmisogynistic dynamic in the queer community is directly caused by the overall toxic, transmisogynistic dynamic in our culture. Queers didn’t invent transmisogyny, the elevation of masculinity over femininity, or the patriarchy. We just came up with exciting new forms of it. (Arty photos of teenagers binding their breasts with Ace bandages! “I date cis women and trans men”!)

Which, ultimately, is my problem with the concept of the Cotton Ceiling. If we are going to challenge people’s lack of attraction to trans women, we should challenge cis straight men’s lack of attraction to trans women too. Why are some cis straight men so repulsed by trans women, and others so creepy and fetishizing of trans women’s bodies? Why do some of them regard murder as an appropriate response to their being attracted to a trans woman?

Kinky Sex Is Fucking Beautiful

I’m friends with one of the founders of Harvard College Munch, and he recently showed me this about how Harvard College Munch is literally the worst thing that ever worsted. Mostly he just wanted to know if he should get “sexual anarchist” on his business cards. (Sources say yes. God, no one has ever called me a sexual anarchist. So upset.)

Now, there are lots of objections that one can have to this article. For instance, what “wide-ranging impact, profoundly effecting students’ daily lives”? I go to a school that has an official school Violet Wand, and yet there are no discernible effects except “lots of students, even vanilla ones, have been electroshocked just to see what it’s like.” I wouldn’t call that profoundly affecting students’ daily lives.

But the objection I want to have is to the sentence “we have always been eager to discuss with these other groups our competing views of how best to honor the dignity and beauty of sex, but we do not even share this much common ground with Munch, which instead seeks to associate sex with violence, humiliation, and oppression.”

(Note: below the cut, I talk about my sex life! If you don’t want to hear about it, here’s Cute Roulette.)

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