Recently, I was remarking to a friend that while growing up,
I never noted being attracted to the same
sex or the other sex. I never thought of being attracted to someone
like me or different than me. I simply
thought, “Men are attractive, and so are women.” When I eventually figured out that trans
people were out there too, I thought, “More attractive people! Awesome!”
Hell, if there were some hypothetical intelligent aliens in an
alternative universe, I’d probably find them attractive as well, regardless of
their sexual bits (or otherwise).
So for this reason I always have found the terms
“heterosexual” and “homosexual” somewhat puzzling (as well as the respective
“heteroromantic” and “homoromantic”). “Pansexual,”
the word for my orientation, happily does not make any reference to “same” or
“other,” which suits me. When I think of
why I find people attractive, it is primarily because the inner person (who is
utterly unique) shines. As a very
distant second, it is because their outer form is pleasing to me. But it is never because they are the “same”
as me, and never because they are “other” or “opposite.” I simply find them beautiful.
Left to my own devices in a world with no terms for orientations,
I imagine I never would have thought of coming up with terms like “attracted to
same” and “attracted to other.” I
probably would’ve come up with a completely different word-system. Something more like “virisexual” and
“femisexual,” in other words, “attracted to men” and “attracted to women.” Bisexual and pansexual probably would have
stayed the same, since neither makes any comment on the sex or gender of the
person who is feeling the attraction.
And what if you’re transgender? What if you identify as two genders, or a
third gender, or no gender at all? What
if your concept of gender is fluid? For
that matter, what if you aren’t even physically male or female? What if you’re hermaphroditic? Ideas of same and opposite apply even
less. As a transgender person
identifying as non-binary, it’s easy for me to talk about my sexuality
accurately, because I happen to be pansexual.
“Attracted to all categories” is fairly accurate, and makes no comment on my sex or gender. But what if I were only attracted to
women? I couldn’t honestly say I would
consider myself to be homosexual, even though I’m in a female body. The “same” label would not be accurate
regarding gender, even if it would be when referring to my physical sex.
When Labels Make It Easy to Discriminate
My friend made an observation in response to this that I
thought was fairly genius. If we did use terms like “virisexual” and
“femisexual” instead of “heterosexual” and “homosexual” when referring to broad
groups, it would be harder to discriminate.
Why? Because if you roundly
condemned femisexual people, for example, you would not only be condemning all
women who liked women, but also all men who liked women. The majority would be condemned right along
with the minority.
Because the labels we do have make a comment about the sex
or gender of the person they are about, they are convenient for
discrimination. It is easy for someone
in the majority who feels prejudicial to stand up and say, “I hate
homosexuals,” because they are referring specifically to a minority, and feel safe doing so.
It would be harder for them to stand up and say, “I hate femisexuals!”
because they would be referring to members of the majority as well—maybe even to themselves or their partners or
members of their own political party.
You could say this is all academic, because the labels are
unlikely to change anytime soon, but it does make you wonder if someone had
this in mind once upon a time when they came up with words like “heterosexual”
and “homosexual.”
The Gay Narcissism Charge
Also related to this topic is the oft-heard accusation by
anti-gay folks that gay people are, apparently, inherently narcissistic—it’s
that whole “attraction to same” issue. Various
academics have played into this view. In
a book by a Dr. Sam Vaknin called Malignant
Self Love: Narcissism Revisited (cited by 99 on Google), one such academic states, “There are grounds to believe
that many homosexuals are repressed or outright pathological narcissists … The
homosexual makes love to himself and loves himself in the form of a same-gender
object.” I’ve also heard this from fundamentalists,
and there is a lot of “sacred union of opposites” talk out there as well (which
doesn’t appear tied solely to one religious perspective). Not to mention the old chestnut, “Opposites attract”
that is so pervasive in popular culture.
I get that “variety
is the spice of life,” and that there is arguably something clinical about
someone who pursues a relationship with someone who they perceive as identical
to themselves. It’d be a bit superfluous
really, and I agree, unhealthy. Trying
to mold someone into a mirror of oneself is foolish and damaging. It is good to value differences in others as
well as commonalities. That said, the
gay narcissism charge makes no sense because every person is unique. Variety is the spice of life … and it’s
everywhere.
You Can't Put People in Boxes
Are we really so simplistic that we can categorize our
identities according to 1s and 0s? Even
if you are cisgender, and even if you are attracted to only one sex or gender,
there is nothing binary about your relationship. Your partner isn’t a 1 or a 0 that matches or
opposes your 1 or 0. That would be a form of objectification. On the contrary, your partner is a
unique human being, different from every other human being who has ever
lived. You can’t quantify that. You can’t put that neatly into a bin. You can’t call a person your “same” or “opposite.” That implies that you both fit neatly into
finite categories, when really, you occupy your own unique space in a spectrum
of infinite, wondrous diversity. No one
will ever completely fit where you do for the rest of space and time.
This is why this whole union of opposites obsession makes no
sense to me. A man is not in any truly meaningful sense the opposite of a woman. Both are human. Both have bodies and minds and souls. If a man and a woman are building a
relationship, their minds and souls hopefully actually do have an abundance similarities, or they are going to have a damn
hard time creating a life together. And …
if you strip away all the cultural conditioning that feeds into gender
concepts, men and women are a lot more
alike than the culture would have us believe.
Of course, they are not the same,
however alike they are. On that exact token, a man and another man are not the same.
A woman and another woman are not the same. Homosexual
people are attracted to the same sex, but that does not make their partner a
doppelganger, for fuck’s sake. Hypothetical
Man A and Woman A may be more the same on an essential level than Man A and Man
B, or Woman A and Woman B. And even if
you brought together the two most similar people in the world (same sex or
otherwise), you would see differences between them, created by their unique
experiences and choices. They could feasibly
share meaningful interactions, and celebrate both their similarities and their
differences in a loving and non-narcissistic relationship together.
In reality, unless you are a total narcissist and you truly are only attracted to the face you see in the mirror every day and the voice in your own head, none of us are really attracted to “same.” Everyone is other. Oversimplifying human relationships does nothing but make it easy to discriminate against minorities, while also encouraging members of the majority group to base their relationships on shallow binary concepts that reveal nothing of the true depth of both partners involved.
What makes a person unique goes way beyond skin-deep.
Someone isn’t different from you because of their sexual organs, or the
same as you because of them. Someone
isn’t different than you or the same because of their gender identity
either. Inside these bundles of skin and
organs and cognitive concepts, we’ve got hopes and dreams, fears, loves,
principles, values, choices, imagination, experiences, and a whole abundance of
other good stuff that goes way beyond sex or gender.
Whether you’re attracted to men, women, both,
neither, other sexes or genders, whatever—you look for people who can share
both similarities and differences with you in ways that can enrich your life
and theirs. There’s nothing narcissistic
about that.
