In a somewhat recent post that I’ve mentioned before Dev said, “In my ideal world (which may or may not be possible at all), set gender roles would not exist. People would not view women and men differently on the basis of sex. Things like femininity and masculinity would be for play, for hotness, and many people would have no need of them. It would be the same way with power dynamics – nobody would be presumed to be stronger or better than anyone else, and people would only use power dynamics for play, like we do in bdsm.”
I heartily concur, and she said it much better than I would have had I tried. Which made me realize that I really haven’t written much here about my views on gender. Maybe because it’s so fucking complicated. Most people like to think that’s not true, but it is. When you start talking about gender and trying to define and neatly box things, you get into a mire pretty quick. Because most of it is bullshit.
If someone were to ask, I’d like to say that gender is just a construct, just an idea, just a made-up way of categorizing people, because people seem to need to put things in tidy little pigeonholes. But I don’t necessarily think that’s completely true. It’s the whole nature vs. nurture debate, which can never be satisfactorily summed up.
I hate thinking of gender as binary. I know it isn’t for me. And it isn’t for a lot of people. But it is so incredibly hard to get out of that mode of thinking, it is so deeply ingrained into society, and into language. And it is rather comforting, or at least easy, to have those tidy little categories. Labels make things easier for the mind to grasp. Or something.
Kitten teases me because I have a “type.” A type of guy I tend to be attracted to. A pretty specific type. *sigh* Ok, very specific. Tall, slender, adorably geeky, submissive guys. Throw a pair of glasses on him, and a button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and I’m salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs. But why? And how can I even begin to justify that when I’m so rabidly anti-binary-gender in general? Because tall, slender, adorably geeky, submissive girls just don’t give me the same reaction. Which is sort of funny to say because that’s a spot-on description of my girlfriend. Is is genitalia? Assumptions of personality based on gendered expectations? I don’t know.
Vaginas and labia and that sort of miscellany don’t really do much for me. Just not exciting, generally. If I had protruding bits that could fit into vaginas, I might feel differently about it. I dunno, I do find female and feminine people attractive, and would happily have sex with any number of women. It’s just that the usually-associated genitalia aren’t part of the excitement.
But I do get excited about cock.
*sigh* Maybe I shouldn’t spend so much time dissecting differences, maybe that’s my problem. I tend to think in extremes. What about intersexed people? Women with big clits, men with small penises, transgendered folk of all flavors? Makes it harder to talk about things when you throw away the categories, labels, little boxes..
I do know that for me, good sex usually doesn’t involve a single thought about gender. It’s just me and my partner enjoying each other. I don’t find myself feeling particularly feminine, or masculine, generally. I do lust after a partner’s sensitive body part to fit into my sensitive body parts, but that’s biology and has nothing to do with “male” or “female.”
I don’t know, I’ve been in a lot of discussions about gender, where some people want to break down all barriers, remove all binary vocabulary, get rid of the whole idea of gender. And there’s always someone who says, hey, what the hell is wrong with having preferences? So what if I like a big fat meatstick and don’t care to look at a wet flesh-hole? And of course everyone is attracted to different things and sometimes those things end up being gender-specific, and of course when your husband transitions to living as a woman you shouldn’t be expected to still be as attracted to her.
Kitten and I have had a lot of conversations about gender and one subject that keeps cropping up is types of people we’re attracted to. For me it boils down to a strong attraction to the aforementioned specific type of guy, and a milder but infinitely more diverse attraction to genderqueer and female people. I like slender guys – a lot. And some cute chubby ones. All submissive, pleasethanks. And that’s pretty much it for the traditional male. When it comes to women and genderqueer people, my attractions run the gamut from thick to thin, from innocent to tough, from dominant to submissive, from feminine to masculine and everything in between.
Meh, it’s easy to analyze things in the abstract. Everything changes once interaction is out of the theoretical and into the flesh. There’s just a click with some people that has nothing to do with what you’d see in a photograph. And sometimes there’s no click at all once a photogenic person is there face to face.
Ah fuck, it’s late and I lost whatever point I may have started out with. Just read that first bolded paragraph that Dev wrote.
...sometimes almost magic... 
