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Hey Doc,
I have a problem so bizarre I’ve literally never heard anyone talk about anything like it, no matter how much out-there sex-and-gender related stuff I read, desperately trying to figure myself out.
It’s like this… In real life I am about the most androgynous, gender-nonconforming person you could find. Since my earliest childhood memories I have rabidly hated anything feminine on my body: skirts, pastels, flowers, ruffles, hair more than 2 inches long, jewelry, makeup, purses, bras. But I don’t feel masculine either, or even butch. I am physically weak, soft, shy, anxious, tender-hearted, submissive in every possible way. I’m barely 5 feet tall so could hardly pass as a man, but too fat to have a recognizably female shape. I can universally be found in black sneakers, khakis and plain solid-color shirts at work, jeans and nerdy T-shirts outside work. I wear “women’s” pants and “men’s” shirts because they fit my body better, but nothing too gendered in style. Cashiers and strangers don’t know what to make of me. I’ve long just accepted sir and ma’am equally, and whatever pronouns anyone wants to use for me.
My romantic fantasies, on the other hand are so ridiculously binary and gender-conformist, it’s embarrassing. Big, strong, heroic, ass-kicking alpha males rescuing and protecting and worshiping beautiful, delicate, petite girly girls. It literally never varies. For the past decade plus I’ve identified as bisexual because I find both men and women attractive. But I’m only into hetero sex. I find the idea of M/M repulsive, which I guess is understandable but the idea of F/F, which you’d think I’d be into, not repulsive, just extremely boring. Either one of the women is more butch, which I don’t find attractive, or they’re both beautiful and feminine, so there’s no bigger, stronger protector, so no sense of romance. And when it comes to the thought of a nonbinary person like myself in sexual situations, we circle right back around to repulsive.
So I’ve wondered if I might actually have some weird new niche asexual-spectrum identity, despite being mentally obsessed with sex and romance and masturbating pretty much nonstop since I was about 14. For the first few years of my sexual awakening I suffered a ton of angst over not being attractive and the thought that I would never have the kind of romance I couldn’t stop dreaming about. I would have gladly become a thin pretty girl if a fairy godmother offered to transform me. But gradually I accepted myself and now would not change even if I could. Because even becoming a beautiful woman would mean only having sex as a woman…only really feeling the woman’s emotions, not the man’s, but getting to touch and worship and wonder at the man’s body, while merely inhabiting the woman’s. But in my fantasies I can imagine both the man’s and woman’s bodies, emotions and sensations in equal detail. Really my dream is to be some kind of disembodied love goddess who brings all these different beautiful damsels in distress together with their hot powerful male rescuers and soulmates and telepathically experiences sex through both of them. But I’m still in touch enough with reality to know how that sounds when I put it into words like that.
I guess the embarrassing part is not so much these feelings and questions themselves, but that I should have this more figured out by now. I’m not a teenager or college kid still developing and exploring myself…I’m in my late thirties! And when it comes to real world experience I’m still a virgin who has never even kissed anyone or been on a date, which is embarrassing all by itself. I had a couple of crushes in high school on guys way out of my league who rejected and devastated me. But since then I’ve done my best not to even let myself feel attraction toward anyone I know in real life.
I’m blessed to be part of an amazing close-knit friend group that formed in late elementary and early middle school. However by this point in our lives they are all married and mothers of kids ranging from infant to middle school themselves. Most of their spare time is spent catering to their kids and husbands, leaving less and less for me. But whenever I mention this as a concern, as I head into middle age alone with no close living family, significant health issues and a very low income, the only solution they seem to come up with is I need to “find someone!” They seem especially eager to help me date women, which I think is partly to give them a chance to demonstrate what good progressive allies they are. But I also get the sense they think women are less looks-obsessed than men, so it would be easier to find a woman who’d settle for me.
I have a hard time getting across to them just how negative I feel about the whole idea of dating. Not only do I have zero hope of being able to attract anyone, man or woman, that I would also be attracted to. But when I try to think about actually having sex, in reality, as myself, it’s the same as when I try to think about fat or unattractive people in general, or androgynous people, or F/F…it’s like eating a big gross pile of mental vegetables, instead of the mental steak fucking a cake that is my typical fantasy. And just like eating vegetables, I know it’s “good” for me but every bite has to be forced, I get no pleasure from it, I end up feeling sort of sick and it’s not sustainable as a habit.
I don’t think any of my friends grasp the fullness of my fantasies, because I’ve had to massively tone down the amount I talked about them, because they couldn’t seem to believe someone as hypersexual and hopelessly romantic as me would not want to at least try to experience it in real life. They seem to think my only problem is low self-esteem, unrealistic beauty standards and struggling to accept myself as non-cishet due to my conservative religious upbringing. When, as you can see there’s so much more to it. It’s not that I’m not horribly lonely at times…fantasies can only go so far, after all…I just can’t begin to picture what a relationship involving me would look like, and don’t enjoy trying.
So that’s where I am. In your opinion, what even is my orientation? Is my choice not to try to date a healthy one, or is it actually just low self-esteem? Is it fair to depend on my friends so much more because I’m too much of a special snowflake to find a partner to lean on like everyone else? Arrrrrggghhhhh!!!!
Binary Lover Outside the Binary
If you’ve read me for long enough, I think you can see the “this isn’t the problem you have” coming from a mile away. But it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t dig into the why it’s not the problem you think it is before I answer you.
Now for the first question… well, straight up, I’m not the person to tell you your orientation. Leaving aside that I’m a straight cis man and don’t have the same perspective that a queer person would, I’m also not you. You know yourself better than I ever would.
What I would say is that sexuality is frequently a multiaxis graph, not just a linear spectrum. Yes, there’s “attracted to same sex/ attracted to different sex” on one axis, but there’s other aspects like whether you’re interested in sex in and of itself or, for that matter, whether you have sexual desire but no interest in having it reciprocated and might feel weird if it was – an orientation known as lithosexual. Let’s be honest: humans are weird. We’re ghosts generated when enough voltage gets run through tapioca to make it hallucinate calculus. We pilot meat suits that have so many variations and mutations and odd combinations of DNA and chromosomes that we only fall into a binary if you squint really really hard. And even then, the identity of the pilot doesn’t always match the mech exterior.
Now let me ask you something in return: is it important that you have a label on it? Is it important that you’d need a label right now? Would a label give you anything more than a name and a set of expectations for you and others to follow? If it wouldn’t, why would those expectations be so important if they don’t necessarily line up with who you are or what you want? Would you feel better if you gave yourself permission to throw your hands up and say “fuck if I know?” and just let it be whatever it is in the moment?
Here’s the thing: you’re non-binary – not necessarily one gender or the other. But to my layman’s understanding, that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily agender, nor are you locked in the exact 50/50 of male or female, just that you don’t fit in the mold of “either one or the other”. Is it possible that in looking for a the binding of label, you’re missing that you could be more fluid depending on the moment or the day – a little more femme some times, a little more masc on others, a little more butch some days and a little more twink on still others?
One of the things about gender is how much of it is a performance, rather than something embodied. The attributes associated with something doesn’t necessarily define it. I’m reminded when Frank Zappa was interviewed by Joe Pine who asked him “You have long hair. Does that mean you’re a woman?” Zappa immediately responded with “You have a wooden leg, does that mean you’re a table?” Much like dickheads who think smugly asking “what is a woman?” is being oh-so-clever, Pine wanted to get an easy zinger, never expecting Frank fucking Zappa rolling in like Diogenes holding up a plucked chicken yelling “BEHOLD A MAN”.
Gender is often as much about what you do and the energy you give as it is what’s in your pants, what cut of shirt you’re wearing or how you style your hair. Being not just gendered, but gendered and sexually desired as that gender doesn’t always require that you hew tightly to the strict binary. David Bowie and Grace Jones famously fucked gender up one side and down the other with their presentation and willingness to eschew binary-based actions and behaviors. Prince didn’t fit most “traditional” ideas of masculinity – being short and slim, delicate-featured to the point of near femininity, with kohled eyes, curled hair, poets’ shirts and skin-tight velvet pants. And yet he was the living avatar of ‘you sexy motherfucker’; not just a man but a sexual tyrannosaurus.
You mention that in your fantasies, you like the idea of both exploring the body of very femme women and very masculine men, both internally (by inhabiting them) and externally (by fucking them) and how both the men and women are at either end of the spectrum. I don’t think that’s inherently a contradiction of who you are or your gender; I think that’s more of a reflection that both exist within you. At the same time, you mention the disgust of the ideas of people who seem more like you – either non-binary or not super-femme or super-masc… and I wonder if perhaps that’s more about you having unresolved issues with yourself and your own body mixed with messages about how men and women are “supposed” to be. You see yourself as insufficiently either and rather than seeing this as “well, perhaps I could be either or both or neither”, you see this as a failure to successfully inhabit one or the other as society has insisted you should be.
But maybe the issue is the idea that one has to be so fully at one end of the spectrum or the other in order to “truly” be their gender. Especially when gender is as much of a multi-axis graph as sexuality.
I wonder, perhaps, if part of the problem is that you’re out there on your own and not seeing how other people may have squared this particular circle. From the way you’ve described your social circle, it sounds like most of your friends are pretty strictly cis and predominantly heterosexual. Maybe it would help for you to get more involved with the queer community – queer as in non-hetero but also as in non-cisgendered. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to find that everyone in the LGBTQ community has it figured out – ask five queer people about gender and you’re going to get six answers and probably seven arguments – but being familiar with a wider array of gender and gender expression may help you put your feelings to words or show you examples that may resonate with you. Seeing how other people live their gender, how they molded and modded their chassis to be their true self and how some may find more freedom in fluidity may help you see options that you never knew you had – or at least give you a greater vocabulary to work with.
It may also help to give yourself permission to explore those sides of yourself more than you have thus far. So far it seems like you long for more stereotypical expressions of gender, but also reject them for yourself due to being insufficiently like the versions found at the most extreme ends of the axis.
What if you allowed yourself to be more masculine on the days you found yourself feeling that way and more femme on the others? Or perhaps if you treated it more like Pratchett’s dwarfs, who only seem mono-gendered? What if you gave yourself permission to explore both the “strong protector” but also the softer, romantic figure, but not tied to gender? Why does the knight have to be the man and the captive the woman?
But what about dating and finding a partner? Is it a wiser choice to sit this out, or is this just low self-esteem talking?
If I’m being honest here, I don’t think the issue is “should you date or not”, nor is it “are you too much of a special snowflake to find a partner”. I think that the issue is that you may not be as far into your journey of understanding who you are as you think you should be. And hey, that’s ok. This shit is more complicated than a lot of folks would like to believe, and fuck knows that the understanding and knowledge of gender and sexuality that step outside strict binaries gets torched every 30 to 40 years. We saw it when the Nazis destroyed the Institute of Sexual Science, we saw it when the straights decided they had to literally blow up disco and we’re seeing it now when state legislatures ban gender affirmative care and ghouls on social media send their self-appointed goon squad to threaten gyms, bars, schools, libraries and clinics. You’re out here, apparently all on your own, trying to reinvent the fucking wheel from first principles while the loudest voices are the ones shrieking like choleric chimpanzees, flinging flaming shit at anyone who looks or acts even slightly different from them.
I think you’d have a better answer for yourself if you knew yourself better and your relationship with yourself were better. This is why I think that getting more involved with the LGBTQ community would be helpful – not just for your identity but also for seeing that dating, relationships and partnerships don’t necessarily need to resemble the model of the strict heteronormative “ideal” that society presents. Having a close-knit circle of friends that you rely on instead of just “a partner to lean on” isn’t lesser; hell, most studies find that relying on one person to be all things is the single greatest strain on a relationship. It may well be that your ideal relationship wouldn’t be romantic or sexual, it would be familial, especially family of choice. Or it may be that you might have a romantic connection with someone but not necessarily a sexual one. Or a sexual one, but not one that people would recognize as traditionally “romantic”. And that’s fine, too. Your relationships don’t need to be fish-or-fowl any more than your gender is or isn’t.
But I think all of it will be much easier once you feel more comfortable and more at home with yourself and your body. Letting yourself be who you truly are instead of who you’ve been told you should be will be transformative, I think. Maybe that will mean leaning a bit more in one direction or the other. Maybe it’ll be more fluid. Maybe it’ll be like Prince or Grace Jones – spitting in the eye of convention and daring someone to tell them that they’re wrong and being all the hotter for it. And if your non-binary nature means being softer and rounder rather than slim or lithe or muscled… that’s no less hot for being unconventional. It’s in the attitude, in the presentation, in the “fuck you, I’m me” of it all and that’s great.
Find the sexy motherfucker within and I think while the rest will be less of a struggle, if not less complicated. But that’s ok… to paraphrase the sage: with a watch as with people, often it’s the complications that make us more valued.
Good luck.
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