Penises: Not my Cup of Tea for Some Reason

So, I was talking to this bisexual guy the other day and we happened to get chatting about sexuality in general. I can't remember how we got to that, but I'm sure it was an awesome segue.

He said, 'I don't know how you monosexuals do it; you're cutting your sexual opportunities in half,' or something to that effect. This dissolved into a mindfarty dialogue in which I started to wonder what the hell it was that made me attracted to women and not men. I mean, I do like a bosom. Anyone who knows me will tell you that, even if you don't ask. But is a bosom the only thing that pulls me towards women? Yes No.

I'm going to binerise gender a little bit here as my experience and exposure to the spectrum is limited to the point of negligable. I haven't forgotten those outside of that binary, I just have nothing meaningful to say at this point.

I had a long think about people I had been attracted to, whether or not that led to anything requited. These people are pretty much all women. But these women are scattered across a range of qualities, both physical and personal, and I was struggling to nail a predictable pattern to them. Other than the obvious quality of being able to sustain an interesting or entertaining conversation for more than two minutes is a good start - having common ground tends to make for better coupling - there really wasn't too much to go on. There certainly wasn't anything particularly 'feminine' about their common qualities other than their bodies in any sense that dragged their circle out of the overlap with my male friends. Sure, they'd wear make up and do womenly things, but their interests and expressions thereof were no different to my close male friends.

So is it just a bodily thing? If I took someone I totally fancied the pants off and body swapped them with a man, would I suddenly stop fancying them? I probably would. And that's weird, isn't it? I guess it's not weird in the evolutionary sense in which a heteronormative urge to procreate ends up being pretty useful at the species level. But we humans tend to think ourselves above our biology, smarter than our instincts and gutteral drives, don't we? I don't like the fact that something that simple can change everything for me; it puts me in the position of marionette, with biology working the strings. Am I not allowed to master my own order of attraction?

The further question is: how much of my sexuality is shaped by genetics and how much by societal structuring of sexuality (and heteronormativity)? Kenneth Miller's research with twins has shown that sexuality is influenced by genetics, but how much is left by our early exposure to what one should deem attractive or not? This is all unresearched waffling, of course, but you can see among all ages how people who follow contemporary trends and fashions tend to be viewed as more attractive than those out of step. Look at heartthrobs and sexy peoples as they were in the 80s - they look hilarious and would be near-undateable if they presented today as they did in that fashionably confused decade. Make-up, clothing, body size and hair all undulate from cool to laughable over the decades and centuries and our sense of what's attractive moves with it. So my question is - how much does sexuality tie in with this sense of 'expected attraction'?

I don't have any answers to this by the way, I just want to know why I don't want to touch a penis. I mean, another penis.

If Not a Jehovah's Witness

Every Thursday, I'm visited by a young Jehovah's Witness. He comes to my door, sometimes alone but often with a sidekick, and we have a chat for half an hour about religion, its truth and its benefits. He's also an ardent Creationist, which I did not realise about Jehovah's Witness. This makes me dubious that he can ever embrace a genuine argument against his position as Creationism is about as solid as a house of cards. Having said that, he's not an idiot by any stretch and his heart is in the right place, if not his head.

Based on the fact that he does seem to be a loving, conscientious individual, I have often wondered how much actual good he would do had he not chosen to follow his ministry. So I asked him where he would be if the church wasn't a part of his life. He's nineteen.

He told me that when he was young, he had often wanted to be a doctor or a physicist. He was particularly passionate about taking up a career in which he could make as much change as possible, where he could help the maximum number of people within his lifetime. 'Then I discovered the Bible,' he said. I'm not paraphrasing, he literally concluded with, 'then I discovered the Bible,' as if this made perfect sense.

He and his family converted to the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses and changed their lives forever. And that's a valid choice - of course it is. I would never force the guy to be a doctor or a scientist. But I found it quite sad to see the vacuum between a man with so much passion (an admittedly a touch of naivety) for making the world better and his choice of realising that passion.

This is a common sleight of hand performed by religion - it can make you believe you're actually achieving something, when in reality you're performing through smoke and mirrors. For example, he often states that he believes the world is in a worst place than ever (something I don't agree with, but let's go with it for now) and there is more unnecessary suffering, greed, etc. than we've ever seen. His solution is to turn to God and hope he'll sort it out. As I've often pointed out, if everyone in the world used this method we would be completely screwed. The only way to bring about improvement is by owning the responsibility for that change as human beings. It's easy to defer to a higher power, but that's completely ineffective is nothing more than illusion.

It would have been nice to have another doctor or scientist in the world with the wide-eyed benevolence of my weekly visitor.