Stranger Couplings
The following excerpt is a personal essay derived from ‘Stranger Couplings.’ It has been edited for length and clarity, and reproduced with consent.
We live in a world of nature and machines. Nature created us and we’re part of it. We created machines and they are quickly becoming a part of us. Maybe one day, we will teach machines how to think better than we can, creating the ultimate ‘artificial intelligence.’ In the meantime, it seems to me that machines are teaching us to think more like they do; to think not nearly as well as we used to. Our own human intelligence is becoming artificial. Machines are helping to dumb us down.
Too many people are hollering at each other, taking opposing intractable positions. Left versus right, right versus wrong, male versus female. These opposing sides imagine yawning voids separating them. We argue about gay versus straight, white versus Black, as if it’s all black and white. Monogamous or not, married or not, happy or not. On versus off. Ones and zeroes. This is machine language, machine logic. I’m ‘the One’ and you’re a zero.
As the blush of pre-dawn creeps further into the day, I say there’s no such thing as ‘night’ or ‘day,’ not as separate ‘things.’ These opposites can be said to exist, but only as a crude two-category representation of an uncountable number of small moments that blur deeply into one another. The moments when a black night slowly assumes a hint of blue; the first touch of crimson light; that first point, then sliver, then crescent of the sun disk as it climbs over the horizon; the new morning moving through itself into midday, into the heat of late afternoon; and then the descent, as the sun falls toward the horizon, dips into the sea, and makes way for the veil of night to return. Day bleeds into night little by little, then night into day.
A ‘spectrum’ is a better conceptual fit for living things, like people and Planet. Imagine the spectrum the way we draw it on a page. Two opposites at either end, a line joining them. The categorical opposites can be said to exist, but stretched between them sits a range of diverse possibilities. A spectrum can represent uncertainty, complexity, trade-offs, one thing blurring into another. The spectrum can help diverse people sharing a perplexing Planet understand each other a bit better. At the same time, the spectrum can represent a tension between two opposites. In this image, the line between the two poles is not a string or a wire: it’s an elastic band. There’s a pushing and pulling going on here. A never-ending tug-of-war.
Male versus female. A basic binary we take for granted. Now take a really hard look. Let’s focus on bits for a minute. There are swinging dicks, medium-sized dicks, down and down to dicks small enough to be mistaken for a large clitoris. There are women who you’d swear have a very small penis, their clits are so fulsome. There are bits that are born ambiguous, or two sets of bits born to the same body. We don’t split like single-celled organisms, creating two identical selves. We combine our genetic junk with genetic junk from someone else, and there’s no telling in advance how that’s going to turn out. It’s as if Nature is saying, “Let’s try this, and let’s try that.” Uncountable genetic experiments with diverse results.
Looking around me, it sure seems like Nature loves diversity. I wish more people would embrace that reality. I wish they’d quit papering it over with words like “the average man” and “the typical female.” Relegating people into two categories and reducing diversity to a mid-point.
Look at an entire human, from the outside. There are (quote-unquote) “manly-men” who are covered in muscles and hair, through to slimmer and virtually hairless men like me. There are folks who could be taken at a glance for a man or a woman. There are women who are stereotypically feminine through to women who are stereotypically masculine, sometimes with tensions between masculine and feminine on the same body. Look around. It’s not hard to find a woman with stereotypically female facial features but manly hands, for example; with large breasts but hips like a teenaged boy. She’s got her mother’s cheekbones, she’s got her father’s nose. That’s exactly what we should expect when two sets of genetic material are being shmushed together.
And why on Earth should we assume that the inside parts will always match the outside parts? In the same way that a woman can have a feminine face and “manly hands,” a woman can be very feminine on the outside but very masculine on the inside. Or the reverse. To different degrees. And maybe shifting over time. Many of us grew up with little girls we called ‘tomboys,’ and not directed at them in a mean way; they might have even liked the label. Here’s a young girl who liked to dress like the boys and play sports with them, and that was fine. At least for a while. At least until her parents or teachers or partners succeeded in hammering her into her ‘proper’ category. And woe to the boy who longs to wear a dress!
Pushing further, what about the people who are born with their insides in polar opposition to their outsides? What if I’m born as a man on the outside, but feel an overpowering sense of womanhood on the inside (or vice versa)? What if this tension between outer-man and inner-woman is so strong, that the elasticity of my mind wants to snap? What if I come to the firm conclusion that I was born with the wrong parts, that the only way to resolve this overwhelming tension is to undergo a procedure to better match my outsides to my insides? I’d say: believe me, help me, and respect me.
A friend, a doctor no less, once said to me (and he said it; he wasn’t really asking): “If you look like a man, but you say you feel like a gorilla, am I supposed to treat you like a gorilla?” Ordinarily, no. But if one of my parents is a human and the other a gorilla, if I looked like the one but acted like the other, then yes, you should totally believe that I feel like a gorilla, and you should at least consider taking a banana from me at my request.
That’s not me, though. Who am I? I’d self-identify as masculine-ish on the outside, with some modest feminine tendencies on the inside. Stronger tendencies than most men, by my estimation. What about my orientation? To call me ‘bi’ makes me feel like a fraud, when I’ve only been on one wild ride with one other man, plus some handiwork with another. I feel like I’ve been strongly attracted to lots of women and only a handful of men.
Too many people imagine others to be either straight or gay. “Pick a side,” they might say. They imagine that ‘bi’ is a small, perhaps deviant, and certainly confused category stuck in between. Another take is that bi folk are “actually” either straight or gay, and are just having some fun on the side, like the young woman in college who makes out with her best friend and then marries the quarterback. I have no doubt that people fitting those descriptions do exist, the strictly straights, the strictly gays, the undecideds and the experimentalists (diversity being what it is). But that’s not descriptive of everyone; it certainly leaves me out.
Alfred Kinsey nearly nailed it on the head in the late 1940s, goddammit. He co-wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, first published in 1948, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published five years later. Somehow, some people have worked hard to suppress or ignore what Kinsey had to say, while others have forgotten or never knew to begin with: “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behaviour the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.” The spectrum, the continuum, the colour wheel, a sliding scale, a rainbow. Diversity: in stillness and in action.
During a time when people might have been even more knotted-up about sex than today, Kinsey found such a startling range of human sexual behaviours; it takes over five pages in his book just to list them all (in a small font). And he found that a much larger number of people than expected had either experienced some sort of sexual encounter with someone else of the same sex or had fantasized about it.
Academics can question his methods and his numbers, in part because Kinsey wasn’t in a position to do random sampling. So, scaling-up any conclusions from his sample to the general population or generalizing from percentages found in his sample to the wider world, seems suspect. Fair enough.
But to me, it’s the broad strokes of Kinsey’s work that matter. Unable to easily pigeon-hole people, he sketched out a concept now called the “Kinsey scale.” At one end, numbered ‘0,’ sit the strictly straights. No sexual experience with the same sex; no attractions. At the other end, numbered ‘6,’ the polar opposite: the strictly gays. In between, Kinsey stretched a spectrum to accommodate almost half of the people he surveyed, with ‘3’ marking the mid-point on the hetero-homo spectrum. He emphasized that “the reality is a continuum, with individuals in the population occupying not only the seven categories which are recognized here, but every gradation between each of the categories, as well.”
I self-identify as a 1.4 on the Kinsey scale. I used to say ‘1.2’, but I think I’ve grown a little gayer over the years. Or maybe I’ve just grown to recognize and accept my unchanging sexuality to a greater degree. Or maybe it’s not one or the other, on or off. Maybe I am someone in between.
