Thursday, October 28, 2010

Sexual Preference

Yesterday I was in Toronto’s downtown core and saw several same-sex couples. Each of the same-sex couples I saw had a commonality between them: For every same-sex couple, there was a person of the male gender and the other was of the female gender. That is, for every same-sex couple I saw, biological sex aside, there was one member who took on the traditional male gender: He or she was sort of burly, walked authoritatively, confident, dressed like a man, and so on. You know the type. The other took on the more traditional feminine gender. You know this type too, and so I don’t need to explain.




From this, I began to wonder. Do these couples frustrate our common understanding of sexual preference? After all, here we have (presumably) each member of the couple attracted to the other member, and (presumably) each member is also attracted to the other member’s sex and gender. Yet, for every couple, the identity of one member’s sex does not correspond to his or her gender. Thus, for every couple, we have a member who has an attraction to the female sex as well as the male gender or the male sex and the female gender. Are these members gay, bisexual or straight?



If we call these members ‘gay’ on virtue of being attracted to the same sex, then we seem to have too much of a parochial understanding of sexual preference. Biological sex and body is only a part of sexual preference, after all. If we call these members ‘bisexual’ even though they have no preference to the opposite sex, then we seem to have abandoned our understanding of bisexuality. And a similar abandonment would be had if we called these members ‘straight’. So…what the fuck do we say?



Let’s consider something else. Some male-sexed transsexuals are hot. Don’t deny this, fellas. For these transsexuals, it is perfectly conceivable that some of are of the feminine gender. If I were attracted to and dated such a transsexual, then would I be gay or bisexual, or at least not straight? I cannot say. And, I suspect this is because our conceptual scheme fails to capture the multifaceted reality of sexual preference.



Moreover, even if we try to understand sexual preference on the continuum of bisexuality, homosexuality and heterosexuality, we’d still be getting a distorted viewpoint. For here, at least on the traditionally used continuums, the divergence of preference in sex and gender is not recognized. And even if it were, we'd need to account for the different conceptions of masculinity within the different cultures. A case in point: You'd find me quite resistant to identify young South Korean men as generally consistent with "the" contemporary western viewpoint of masculinity.

No comments: