I know that humans need labels in order to make the complexities of life easier to understand. A whisk is a kitchen appliance, therefore it belongs in the kitchen. Right, that makes sense, and seems like a useful categorization. But I get gratuitously irritated when people do this with gender: e.g., women want intimacy, men want sex. Perhaps I particularly loathe this stereotype because I do not relate – but there is also a great amount of evidence that disproves much of this preposterous differentiation.
From my favorite blog, again.
Emily Nagoski wrote this fantastic book about female sexuality. One of her most revelatory statements is this: “everyone’s genitals are made of the same parts, organized in different ways.” Let’s unpack this (I’m essentially taking this straight out of her book, so giving credit where credit is due!): biologically speaking, our external genitalia are homologous. “Both male and female genitals have a round-ended, highly sensitive, multichambered organ to which blood flows during sexual arousal.” For females, it’s the clitoris; for males, it’s the penis. “Each has an organ that is soft, stretchy, and grows coarse hair after puberty.” For females, it’s the outer lips; for males, it’s the scrotum. These parts are developed from the equivalent fetal tissue: if you look at the scrotum, you’ll see a seam running up the center – that’s where his scrotum would have split into labia if he had developed female genitals instead. We talk about men “getting hard” and women “getting wet,” when from a biological perspective, both male and female genitals get both hard and wet (the clitoris hardens, the penis secretes pre-cum).
Sure, you might be thinking, so there are biological similarities. But all those stereotypes must stem from somewhere! But just as different people have vastly diverse-looking genitals (not only between genders, but within genders), different people also have a variety of sexual accelerators and brakes. These difference should not be chalked up to “gender differences”, because sexuality is just not that simple. There is just as much sexual variety within gender groupings as there is between all genders. The differences we’ve supposedly observed stem more from socialization, religious and cultural maxims, terrible choice in words (e.g., “medieval anatomists called women’s external genitals the ‘pudendum,’ a word derived from the Latin pudere, meaning ‘to make ashamed.’ Our genitalia were thus named ‘from the shamefacedness that is in women to have them seen.'”), female oppression (see previous example), and lack of rigorous scientific study.
My reason for wishing to evaporate the lines we’ve drawn between genders is this: it is harmful. It is harming the women who think that their sex drive is somehow “broken”, because it’s not spontaneous “like men’s”, and the women whose sex drive is “too high” to be “womanly”. It is harming men who think that their sex drive is too low because they don’t think about sex “every seven seconds“. It’s harming those who do not identify with either gender. It extends beyond gender: racial stereotypes are often sexualized – and unarguably harmful. It’s harming the man who said he would have to start “questioning his sexuality” if I continued to insist that clitorises are very much like penises. It’s harming the woman who insists that all men are “horny cheaters” and can’t be trusted. This “gender war” is not beneficial to anyone, and it needs to end.
