What You Really Really Want (12 page)

Why bother describing all of these gender differences if we're all women? You can probably guess the answer: because gender expression and identity are used all the time to limit women's sexual choices. We assume that masculine women want to have sex only with other women, when many of them like sex with men. We treat transgender and intersex women like freaks who are only allowed to have a sexuality if they're willing to be objects of fascination to fetishize, and whose genuine sexual desire is treated as disgusting and dangerous. We assume that very feminine women are pure and passive and malleable (and heterosexual, of course!), just waiting for a strong man to come along and marry them.

It's also true that women who are gender “transgressive” in any way are often assumed to be either sexually untouchable or hypersexual. Enoch says:

You can also probably guess by now that none of these stereotypes reflect the wide range of sexualities experienced by the women in these groups. And you can further guess that now's an awfully good time to take a look at the nuances of your own gender expression and identity, and the baggage that may come along with them.

It may seem overobvious to say that sexual orientation interacts with sexual identity, but the interactions can and do go far beyond simply the gender of your preferred partners.

Let's start at the beginning. Everyone has a sexual orientation. All that means is that you're attracted to some particular combination of genders or gender expressions. The most well-known terms for sexual orientation are “straight” or “gay,” but that's far from a complete list. Some people identify as bisexual,
which means they're attracted to both men and women. Some people are attracted only to masculinity or femininity, regardless of gender. And there are endless combinations. Personally, I identify as “flexisexual,” a word I invented because I'm attracted to more than just men and women, and because my patterns of attraction have changed over time. Some people do find that their sexual orientation changes throughout their lifetime, while others consider it a completely fixed part of their identity. There's no right or wrong answer, but it's worth thinking about: What's your sexual orientation?

Whatever your answer, it can have an impact on what people expect from you sexually, and therefore what you expect from yourself. What's more, it can also affect how comfortable you feel discussing and exploring your sexuality, which can have a major impact on your ability to know what you really really want.

This impact is most obvious for women who identify as lesbian, bi, or queer or have other nonheterosexual identities. Queer women are still treated by many people as “sick” or “unnatural.” Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. No one sexual orientation is more or less natural than any other, including heterosexuality, but the pervasive belief that straight is “right” can lead queer-identified women to try to deny their sexual orientation to themselves or others, feel shame, or otherwise cut themselves off from their sexuality.

Do you feel complicated emotions around your body when it comes to sex? You're not alone. A 2011 survey of British women found that 52 percent of them avoid sex because they feel bad about how their bodies look, 13 percent have sex only in the dark because they don't want to be seen naked, and 10 percent avoid sexual positions they'd otherwise enjoy because they feel ashamed about various parts of their bodies.
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We rely on body shape and size far too much when deciding who's sexy and who's sexual. Women who are flat-chested and not very curvy are often assumed to be asexual or docile or attracted to women, while women with fuller breasts and some
curve to their hips are assumed to be always-ready, indiscriminate sex machines. (These body types map somewhat to racial stereotypes, too: The “hot-blooded” Latina is likely to be curvier than the “ready-to-serve” Asian.)

Because our culture has a super-narrow definition of what kind of female body is sexy, most women feel insecure about theirs. There are all kinds of things a body can do or be that will land it outside the “sexy” box. You could be short. You could have blemishes on your skin. You could have short or coarse or frizzy or thinning hair. The more ways your body goes against the “sexy” standard, the less desirable you're assumed to be.

Another example of ways in which your body might not fit into the social standard of sexy is if you're fat. (It's okay to say “fat”: Fat people tend to know they're fat. It's a descriptive word. It doesn't have to be a slur unless you mean it that way.) Fat women are treated as utterly undesirable in our culture. Similar to the ways transgender and intersex women are treated, when it comes to sex, fat women are often turned into a “bizarre” fetish object. The result is that fat women are told to be grateful for any sexual attention they receive from anyone, whether they themselves find that person sexually appealing or not. In other words, even more than your average women, fat women are only allowed to be occasional objects of desire and are regularly denied their right to have and pursue sexual desires of their own.

This way of thinking becomes very dangerous when sexual violence is mixed in. When fat women are raped, they're often told they should be grateful that anyone wanted them, or, alternatively, disbelieved because it doesn't seem plausible that anyone would want them “enough to rape them.” These arguments not only rely on the dangerous myth that rape is about uncontrollable sexual desire (it's
not
), but also propagate the message that fat women's bodies aren't valuable enough to the culture for their violation to be taken seriously. (For more resources on body acceptance, I highly recommend Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby's book
Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere
.)

Another variety of experience is when your body is disabled or in some way functions differently than most people expect it to. If your physical difference is easy to spot visually, because you walk with a cane, or use a wheelchair, or have a prosthetic limb, you'll likely be subjected to many of the same treatments that fat people get. Plus, you'll have the added “bonus” of many people's assuming you're not even physically capable of having sex or sexual desire.

But some less visible physical differences can also have a big impact on the room the culture makes for your sexuality. For example, there is no sign for “consent” in sign language. The concept of sexual consent literally doesn't exist in the language
many deaf people use to communicate. When you combine that glaring absence with the poor or nonexistent education and social services many deaf people have access to, it creates obstacles to their ability to conceive of and express their sexuality that many hearing people can scarcely imagine.

What's extra sad about all of these social limitations put on women with “nonideal” bodies is that, in reality, there are people who have genuine sexual desires for all different kinds of women's bodies. It's probably true that conventionally pretty women get more sexual attention than women whose bodies fall significantly outside the norm, because we all get trained about what we “should” find attractive, and people who sleep with women aren't immune to that socialization. There are social consequences for people who are attracted to “nonideal” women, too, and many folks don't want to pay that price, or have never considered that they could opt out of the limited system they were handed. But there are also people of all genders who have spent some time figuring out what they really really want, and those people have an infinite variety of sexual appetites. After all, the women in that British study I referenced are the ones avoiding sex, having it with the lights out, and limiting their own sexual positions. Know what that means? They have willing sex partners who want them. It's the women themselves who are holding themselves back based on their fears about their own bodies.

What's more, healthy sexual partners will be attracted by your confidence and comfort in your own skin, sometimes even more than by the details of your physical body. Feminist theorist bell hooks learned this lesson personally. In her book
Communion: The Female Search for Love,
she recalls that “when I was thin anorexically and had difficulty eating, I had far fewer partners than during years when I chose to be healthy and to affirm and admire that as the most vital sign of beauty.”
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And she challenges us all to do the same: