Flexible fetishry.
Just going on record as agreeing with the eminently sensible Ampersand (and thus, by extension, former housemate and all-around mensch, Chas.): heterosexuality (or homosexuality) is best viewed as something of a fetish. —Some indulge in it to a greater degree than others, and some not at all, but it’s basically a means of fixing and focusing one’s desire—something we all do, of course, with this or that (hair color, body size, race and ethnicity, a way of laughing or telling shaggy-dog stories, that thing they do with their wallet chains), for reasons both hardwired (genetically and culturally) and whimsically contingent. —The sex (or gender, depending) of the object(s) of one’s desire(s) is just one more way of focussing, hieghtening, discriminating. (As in taste. Do keep up.) —Do note also that this is not so much a present verity (such things being rather tied to cultural standards and outlooks, and the culture at large being rather, shall we say, hung up on certain issues) as it is an ought-to-be (and given some of those hang-ups I’d agree provisionally that it is better as an end than its promulgation in the here and now is as a means to that end); keep in mind heteroflexibility and its (admittedly) thorny obverse, and always, always take the claims of evolutionary psychologists with a shaker or two of salt.
(Who, me? For the record? Something of a fetish for the opposite sex, indeed, though not so it’s a requirement or anything, and we could spend some time drawing distinctions between actual people and pop culture totems and icons and one’s [my?] differing responses thereto, but we’d get bogged down in stupid discussions of the putative male visual response and endless Schroedinger’s cat-like arguments on what’s a “real” measure of whatever it is we’re trying to measure. —And anyway, I could start throwing up lenses of gender and further confuse the issue: brusque men with small wrists and pungent senses of humor dandied up just this side of effeminate; butch femme women [as opposed, you see, to femme butches] with short unblond hair and little truck with lipstick [odd, to think I’ve forgotten what lipstick tastes like], and you could if you wanted impose the one on the other to see what similarities bleed through, or if a difference [even here] yet vives, but none of it explains the year and a half I spent in my youth enthralled to my best friend’s sister, as gawky tall as I was in her bare feet, with heavy ringletted curls of golden hair cascading down to the small of her back. There’s your “type,” yes, and then there’s the people you fall for, and one must never mistake the map for the thing mapped.)
Commenting is closed for this article.
You are, like, so gay.