Thought of the day inspired by a friend:
Our focus on which genders we are attracted to as the defining aspect of sexual orientation is ONLY because that aspect is currently a source of oppression. That oppression has a big impact on our lives which is why which genders we feel attraction to feels like such an important part of our sexuality.
But when you forget about that oppression for a while.. it’s clear that there are many other aspects to what kind of person we are attracted to, many aspects to what we look for in sex and relationships, many aspects to what importance we give to sex and relationships, how much and in what context, etc etc.
If you wanted to arbitrarily pick an aspect of our sexuality to form an identity around, you could pick from hundreds, maybe thousands of aspects. All potentially more fixed or fluid, important or unimportant to us than the gender of our partners.
Which aspects, in a world without homophobia and biphobia, would feel the most fundamentally important to our sexuality? How much does homophobia and biphobia stop us from knowing our sexuality as a whole? From looking at our sexuality as something incredibly multifaceted and diverse in which ‘which gender box does my partner identify with?’ is probably not the most important question for many of us to ask?
(Edit: if you’re going to reblog this PLEASE don’t immediately start talking about your kinks. Yes, kink can be an important aspect of your sexuality but I was kind of hoping for a little bit of a wider view of sexuality than gender+kink thank you very much.)
Wouldn’t we just be left with the current notion of “compatability”? Am I missing the question?
We might be, but we’d have a lot more language for it beyond ‘are our genders and kinks compatible?’.
Right now, there’s shorthand like ‘I’m gay’ or ‘I’m a bottom’ which describes a large complex thing in one identity-word but there’s no shorthand for all these other aspects like how we communicate about sex. There’s no shorthand for ‘I am very communicative about consent during sex but I’m focussed on your consent so you need to really shake me out of that occasionally to remind me to check my own consent and not just answer in the affirmative without checking my emotions.’
We don’t necessarily need shorthand for these aspects, but right now they’re less talked about and we know less about our own sexuality as a result. Most of us have probably spend more time thinking about what gender we’re attracted to than about how we communicate about sex.
If we only check for compatibility, we lose a lot of opportunity to get to know our own sexuality for ourselves.
QueerAnarchism 