Androgyny: The True Gender

What???  Yes, I know. Hear me out.

I'll start off with the information that is obvious a few posts down. I am asexual, or I identify as such. I have no real attraction to people sexually. By that I mean... none. I have a baby, but that's because it was around our honeymoon phase for my husband and I, and I love him, so.. yeah.

I am attracted to personalities, regardless of what body they inhabit. Not sexually, from a deep level of connect, similar to friends and family spliced.  With all that in mind, I'll continue.

I went through a phase (And I call it a phase because that is how my mind works, not because I have no respect for this or think it is for other people) a few years ago, trying to find my identity. I didn't feel right.  I felt like I was in the wrong body, or the wrong world, and I just wasn't me, externally. So, I decided to spend some time figuring out who and what I was internally. I used different terms as they came to mind, and I considered myself "Gender Neutral and both simultaneously", and "bisexual".  By "bisexual", and I explain this to explain to my truly bisexual friends, I was not attempting to diminish bisexuality, I was just trying to find the proper words.

What I meant was, that I see both genders as beautiful, truly beautiful, equally. In an artistic sort of way. Not actually attracted to them (Boobs are fun to look at, I don't really know why. I mean, I have them, and I still look. It's not intentional, either. I don't really know why I do it, it's just social awkwardness. But what sets me apart from bisexual people is that I am not sexual. So, I have no real interest in their genitalia.  I love my husband. Penises look weird.  That's pretty much as simple as I can put it. (Vaginas are pretty gross too, but I haven't seen and am not interested in seeing many of those..)

But I'm getting a bit off topic.  Now, I will describe how I feel, "gender wise", and explain why I chose that term.  I have a book I found today, Androgyny: Toward a new theory of sexuality, by June Singer. I found it at a place I visited in Downtown Portland this morning.

I will paraphrase the part of the introduction I am referring to, as it is fairly wordy. If you are interested, I will type it all up.

Basically, Sheldon S. Hendler said the following.  "The purpose June Singer has found for us, she tells us is to become conscious of the way we exist within the cosmic scheme."

To do so, we must explore the grounds of our opinions. We then enter the process of becoming conscious of the many aspects of ourselves, of who we really are and not "who we are supposed to be."  In becoming conscious, we become aware of the dualities that have molded us:


Activity/Passivity
Competition/Co-operation
Independence/Dependence
Logic/Intuition
etc

The one duality that seems to be the generator of all the others is that of male-female. Dr. Singer believes the resolution of our dualities, is not to combat between them but to love each for the other, the state of Androgyny.

That's what I'm going to tackle and mention first.

See, what really bugs me (As so, so many things do <3.. Yet I'm actually a very happy person! You wouldn't know it to read this blog :/) is that we have been taught on a subconscious level that one of those is for one gender and one is for the other. Can you guess?

Yep.  Left=stereotypical male, right=stereotypical female.

And that's what bugs me the most. I don't WANT to squash myself into those boxes. Our society's expectations of us due to our genitals is absurd at best, devastating at worst. The repercussions can be tremendous.

In high school, I was painfully shy. I had low self esteem, I was passive about everything, and I was unhealthily intuitive (escapism+"intuition" can be a bad combo).  In short, I was a different person.

I have worked very hard on myself, because I did not like who I am. I am now more aggressive than passive, at least online. In person, due to my petite size, I don't tend to want to piss people off who could hurt me.  Kinda logical, right? I think so, anyway. (Welll, at one point, on Zoloft, I told a drug dealer how much of a worthless piece of shit he was. He threatened to kill me, so I kinda got off that pill real quick.)

I have never really felt like I belonged. As someone who has absolutely no interest in sex, and doesn't understand what the attractiveness is of sticking one's genitals in you, or your genitals in someone else, our world's hypersexuality is very disturbing.

Yes, disturbing. I mean, to me it's sad when a 6 year old boy is kicked out of school for singing a song he doesn't understand, and wiggling his butt.  Sexual assault? Really?? I'm not a sexual person but I have been conditioned to see it everywhere. Even hints of it. Bras are designed to push breasts up and put them on display. The typical style is meant to attract the opposite(or same) sex. Everything.

Me? I dress for me. I dress for what makes me feel powerful, happy, good about myself. Around my house, I often just wear my nursing bra and a pair of pants. I breastfeed. *shrug* I love everything from pinstripe suits to dresses, jeans and button up shirts to.... whatever else. I like style, whatever it may be. I love steampunk. I don't love that I'm expected to "look good" i.e. sexy. It annoys me, and I don't care.

Now, here's when I get weird.  (ME?? Weird? Nooooooooooo.)

I don't mind being sexy for me. Or for the fun of it. I just don't do it for other people. I don't mind doing it for Jason because it makes him happy. But I really just do it for the aesthetics. Seeing me, I look pretty feminine. I don't tend to wear "masculine" clothes. I do love my pinstripes, though :/ I don't own any right now, but boy, do I. I am at least mentally androgynous. I'm sometimes more stereotypically feminine- passive, etc. I'm sometimes more stereotypically masculine- aloof, aggressive, blunt.  I just feel like me, a mixture in between.

Androgyny doesn't necessarily mean binding your breasts and putting on a suit. To me, it's a mental thing.

What is it to you?



If you read my blogs and like my views or the way I write, and am curious about my opinion on a specific topic, please let me know by contacting me on facebook- facebook.com/eternalaraelys, or here.

Gender Roles, Rules, and Gender Identity

There's a lot of things that have bothered me most of my life. Because of it I've kept quiet until recently... One of the major things that has always bothered me is this nice tangled, explosive bundle of chaotic crap. When you are growing up*, people are essentially brainwashed and trained to believe certain things. Most of the time because of all the mixed signals, it fails horribly. I started realizing this when I was about 13 years old.  Gender rules of behavior are a major catch 22. It's quite ridiculous, and downright medieval.  For the record, this subject bothers me to a fundamental level, but I *WILL* be doing my best to curb my cursing, though on this subject it pains me.

I'll begin with women, which is where I started to realize how grossly unfair it all is. I remember distinctly in freshman year of high school hearing almost everyone in the locker room bitching about how unfair it is that women are called whores if they have sex with more than one person, but men are commended for it. (Note, they said girls and guys.. same general rules apply.)  But even then I also noticed the other, darkly twisted side of the entire thing. I'm honestly not even sure I can post this without twisting it to untwist it to explain it because it's that jumbled.

Wow I honestly have no idea where to start.. Okay. Basically, women and men have been lumped into very peculiar, rigid, twisted and confused archetypes of the masculine and feminine. Women are, as my father said, supposed to be a lady on the street and a whore in bed. That's kinda true.. And kinda not.  Females and males are expected to be such an extremely varied array of traits and are supposed to do so many actions to conform to it that all that happens is people get more upset and confused as time goes on. This is things I have observed in large quantities, and I'm not saying that everyone believes it, but growing up we are given so many mixed signals that they grow into contorted forests, festering within.

Women are expected to be sexually deviant to please men, and yet if they are they're considered whores. I've heard women called bitches, whores, by people being dead serious that all women are sluts, that they're weaker than men, that they belong in the kitchen... Essentially, think of every stereotype you've heard of women. None of them are true completely because people aren't like that. I don't claim to know why it all got so twisted, but looking around it all disturbs me. I'm also not saying that everyone believes it, or that it's true.. But as kids we were given fairly restrictive gender roles, which often contradicted each other and themselves. People aren't just positive or negative, masculine or feminine, because the traits themselves are not gender specific.

It's almost like a lot of people are acting like they THINK people want them to act, which continues the cycle. Unfortunately, I have no clue how to help. All of my life that I can remember I have felt detached, an observer in the game of life. I see what's wrong, but for some reason I'm just too detached to be able to find the piece to FIX the problems that I can see. It's like.. I can see what it SHOULD be, but I have no idea how to rearrange the pieces of the twisted puzzle.

People's actions and personalities can't be confined to female or male because female and male are archetypes created by the physical body parts of each. Sure, it makes sense in SOME WAYS.. but not all. Logically I can understand it to a small degree but it just grew twisted and contorted and... it really bugs me. I don't like feeling like anything I do is going to conform to someone's twisted archetype of how they think I do or should act. Nothing is that simple... The beauty of life is the systems in it. So why are the ones that matter the most twisted by people? I don't understand how it happened... I really don't. How did we come to this confusing point in society? How? How did this happen to us? How can we fix it?

The Gender Binary System

Ah, the gender binary system.  This one may get some nasty responses, but I don't care. Scientifically we are all comprised of both "female" and "male" dna. We're all genetic hybrids all the way down from the first children, assuming that there ever was "pure male" and "pure female" DNA.  You're a splice of your mother and father, who are a splice of their mother and father, etc. When you're born, your body is a bizarre thing that for some reason grows to maturity into a recognizable shape to everyone else.  Somehow your cells know how to build themselves.. That doesn't mean that it matches how you feel, or how you think, etc.

We are not inherantly male or female. The mind is a magnificent, complex thing. So are human emotions. You can't expect someone who was born into a physically female or physically male body to automatically feel what society thinks you should feel like- what society believes male and female to mean. There are not just two genders, a plus and a minus. There are many ways of viewing it, and putting names on it only shrinks the importance of how other people feel.

It can happen many ways, it's not necessarily a chemical thing in the brain, though it could be. It could be anything from the internal war of nature vs nurture, of their personality vs their past, of them fighting something that happened or was said to them so many times that it just caused a reaction, or it could simply be who they are.

Take me for example. I don't know when I started to feel as I do now, but I know that when I was 12 to 18 I lived with my father, who I love very much to this day, who was a sexist prick when he was drunk. The amount of filth I heard about women was astronomical, and mixed with what I was learning about in school and finding out from books, it caused a reverse reaction in me. For years when I masturbated (Yes, I admit I masturbate. It happens :P) I envisioned myself only in the male side because for so many years my father had unwittingly trained me to believe men are stronger and better than women. It led to an internal war that has lasted even to this day, over 7 years from when I first remember feeling the war, and still wages on inside my mind. I don't know what is winning, but I do hope it's me.

My mind has felt like a battlefield since I was 14 years old. My father's unwitting "training" vs my belief that men are the scum of the earth ((Which was a response to attempt to balance it out)) shifted to a disgust for all things sexual that lasted for a few years. Now, I don't even know. I still have times when just hearing certain things about sex, I can't even tell you what, but primarily people telling me too much information about their personal lives is like someone lighting my hair on fire.  I suddenly get filled with an extreme amount of rage and have to walk away.

On the other hand, I have a relationship now, and while we haven't had sex, I think he is the only person I will ever enjoy having it with.

But to get back to the gender binary system that this blog was originally about... I don't feel feminine all the time.  I have my moments where I like skirts and dresses and dressing female, and my times where I'd rather not have breasts and a vagina and would rather wear a suit, cut my hair even shorter, and dress like a "man". 

I tend to sit sprawled out as most males do, because it is more comfortable to me. I'm more blunt than most people I meet, and I don't mind it. I find both males and females attractive, but have never met a female I'd consider worth dating. Who we like and what we like and how wel ike to dress and what we like to do has nothing to do with our plumbing- That could have been miswired when the cells were expanding from the egg and the sperm. Having a vagina doesn't make you all female any more than having a penis makes you a man. The person within this shell of a body is what matters, not the shell itself.


YOU matter. Not your weird bits and pieces.