Thursday, November 05, 2009

The Thing About Simplicity Is DORDORDOR!

The other day, I overheard a conversation that included this snippet:

Guy: The women run the show here, dude. Everyone in charge is a woman, except for Robert. And Robert is a fag, so he's basically a woman, too, y'know?

So Guy posits here that one's true gender is basically reducible to one's sexual preference: if you have sex with men, then you are a woman (and vice-versa, presumably). And I think you'll admit that it's both a hilarious joke AND a pretty persuasive argument. Because gay men sometimes have high voices and love shopping! You can't debate that! Sure, it would be a different story if gender were about something more than the kind of genitalia a person prefers to play with. I mean, if you're one of those people who says shit like, um, "Gender is an unfathomably complex bundle of nuanced behaviors and motivations and thoughts and desires governed by what must be millions of constantly-shifting little rules, some of which govern us and compel us without our knowledge or conscious consent - just ingrained somewhere in the tens of billions of interconnecting and alternately-firing neurons that make up our brains - while other rules are borne out of the brain's insane ability to be simultaneously capable of adjusting on the fly throughout life - of adapting to the circumstances into which that individual brain is born and raised, sometimes accepting circumstance as immutable law in an effort to just get by in this world, other times thinking critically about whether the herd is going in the right direction, and at every second determining what a man/woman/person is and isn't, and what they should and shouldn't be. It's this crazy, always-changing process - an interplay between being bound by our biological encoding to be a certain way, and empowered by that encoding to choose who we want to be, and what it means to be male or female, and what the importance is of these lines that we are continually compelled to draw in the sand..." if you're one of those people, then you might think that gender is more than the junk-diddling thing I was talking about 700 words ago. But if you're one those people, you're gay and wrong and shut up.

But then I was thinking about it for a second, and I was like, "Wait. But if anyone who has sex with men is basically a woman, then whenever a man has sex with a man, they are each having sex with a 'woman.' And if they're each having sex with a woman, then that makes them both men again. But if a man has sex with a man, he is having sex with a 'woman,' so he's a man. And so on into infinity! Man! Woman! Man! Woman! Infinity!" Then I imagined two people having sex and constantly shapeshifting between male and female forms, and I thought it could be like a trippy screensaver. Then I got angry. Then I got aroused. Then I got angry. Then my head started hurting, and I realized that we live in a breathtakingly complex world, and it's easier/better to just call gay people fags, kick them out of my gender, and move on.

3 comments:

Elliott said...

SHAWN! It's been a while since I've lurked your site. How's have you been? Any good karaoke nights?

Elliott said...

I just realized that I typed "How's have you been".

I debated editing it, but then I thought it worked in a weird way, but still decided to make this comment about it in the hopes that you don't consider me a dumbass.

Shawn said...

ELLIOTT! Good to hear from ya, man. I'ves been good. (You're right: it works, in like a mookish/wiseguy sort of way that neither of us is equipped to pull off.)

No karaoke or anything recently. My singing voice is like the Sudarium of Oviedo: it only comes out three times a year, it is said to have been touched by Jesus, and it makes people weep tears of rapturous whatever.

But yeah, we should go sometime. How've you and Cat been?