Genitalia: an explorative review

So far, I have interacted with three penisses and three vaginas belonging to people at various points of the gender spectrum. A not-serious, probably very TMI, and potentially offensive summary of my observations can be found below the cut.

Of maps and territories 2: Right and wrong maps

[Part 1 is here]

In everyday situations of disagreement or confusion about the meaning of specific terms (which features of the territory they correspond to), people are usually quick to pull up everyone’s favorite online encyclopedia or a dictionary website (or even reach for an actual, physical dictionary, if they’re old-fashioned that way) to resolve the matter. It’s the adult equivalent of asking a teacher: consulting an entity widely accepted to have some kind of expertise on the issue at hand.

A privilege of sex or gender

I sorted through some old browser bookmarks today and found this exchange, in which a user on tumblr challenged others to to name and prove male privileges. Another user responded with the following list of 47 items (slightly edited for easier reading) :

Data follows reality

[Going back to writing a post a day regardless of quality, because apparently everything else just gets me stuck not writing anything.]

I.

My mother has big feet.

She used to jokingly refer to her shoes as “children’s coffins” (and probably still does). Few stores or catalogues or even online shops carried women’s shoes that fit her, and the models they had were often very unflattering: drab and clunky, or impractical, or both. Any time she found shoes that fit her and that she actually liked, she got super excited, and made sure to remember the brand and check out more of their models and/or come back to it when she needed new ones.

A while ago, I came across some recommendations for where to buy shoes as a trans woman – a list of stores and brands offering shoes in big sizes. Amidst the many excited comments by women happy to finally find shoes in their size, there was one that said something along the lines of “Women’s shoes in your size don’t exist because actual women don’t need them.”

II.

A classmate of mine in high school was a passionate basketball player.
And she was worried about that. She already had a crooked nose, a narrow, angular face, and a broad chin: all attributes more commonly associated with male than with female faces. If playing more and more basketball, throwing herself into it, and becoming better at it now also gave her a more athletic, muscular build, would she look “too masculine”? Would she look “like a man”? What if everybody else thought so? What if the guys she was into found her too unfeminine, too manly? We reassured her as best as we could, but her concerns persisted.

Last fall, H&M released an ad featuring (among many others) a trans woman. Conservative Christian group One Million Moms was outraged at “what appears to be a man dressed as a woman” and called for boycotts.

The woman they were up in arms about was Fatima Pinto, a muscular, broad-shouldered Muay Thai fighter. Who also happens to be cis.

III.

It’s easier for me. Strange, considering that maleness is culturally largely considered “better”, but somehow being unmanly does not seem to make one automatically womanly: people might scoff or sneer at my more feminine features, but they consider me a failed man rather than a woman, and often not even that: the only time someone offhandedly mentioned my face being feminine in my presence, his wife was quick to assure me that “girls like that anyway”.

But it’s fucked up.

Muscles are not male or female, they just are. Feet and hands and hips and eyebrows and skin and hair and livers and erythrozytes and cerebella are never male or female. Even by the (simplified, incomplete) tales told by biology textbooks, these are not sexual characteristics, neither primary nor secondary. (Well, some hair is: beards are a male secondary sexual characteristic according to textbooks, so bearded women could be said to have some male characteristics. It probably shouldn’t be, though – it would serve no purpose and very likely be deeply annoying to bearded women at best and hurtful at worst.)

Many human features, height, shoe size, hip circumference, and others among them, are roughly normally distributed. (Very roughly, actually: a true normal distribution extends limitless into both directions, but a person cannot have a height of less than zero. But modelling it as a normal distribution still yields pretty good predictions for the distribution of actual data, so this flaw is usually just kind of ignored.)

Modelling them separately for men and women yields slightly different distributions with slightly different means. So does modelling them separately for people of different countries, people of different colors, people of different ages (duh), and many other characteristics. If you just gather data from enough people of any two categories, it’s even likely that all of these differences will be statistically significant.

A woman who is 1.90 m tall is statistically less likely than a man who is 1.90 m tall. An Asian woman of that height would be less likely than a white one. However, a white man with achondroplasia, despite being white and male, would be much less likely than the Asian woman to be this tall. (And a 1.90 m tall three-year-old, regardless of gender, is nigh impossible – so much so that I’m quite confident such an individual has never existed.)

But for fuck’s sake, people, that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for a woman to be 1.90 m tall, or that being 1.90 m tall means you can’t be a woman. There are women who are 1.90 m tall. There are women with big feet, and big muscles, and narrow hips, and angular jawlines. No matter how unlikely something is given statistical distributions, if it exists, it exists anyway. Data must follow reality, not the other way around.

And I want to write this sentence on a pool noodle and use it to bump the heads of everybody who ever uses statistical distributions to deny someone’s womanhood, to make her feel like she has to fit herself to the data, like her body is wrong just because it’s statistically unlikely. (And the same goes for manhood and nonbinary-hood.)

Of maps and territories

[None of the thoughts in this post are original. I’m writing it anyway, because I figure the more people write about the basic idea behind this, the better: everyone will word it a little differently and reach a somewhat different audience, so each new post about it will increase the likelihood of more people coming in touch with and understanding the idea behind it. So here goes!]

This is a map of Austria (full size here):

Childhood sexuality

Today, I learned that fetuses masturbate. I was intrigued and went on to search for and read stuff about masturbation in fetuses, babies and toddlers on various websites.
It was both fascinating and frustrating.

Weaponized feelings and non-violent communication

A few years or so ago, my circle of awareness was abuzz with people voicing enthusiasm for non-violent communication (NVC), and while it seems to have died down by now (the last time I heard anything about NVC was almost exactly a year ago, and only in the form of a flyer promoting a workshop), I’ve been thinking about it again lately.

Communication and #NotAllMen

Every now and then, someone makes a statement like “men are socialized to not listen to women”, or “men feel entitled to women’s time”, or “men constantly cross women’s boundaries”, and almost inevitably someone chimes in with “not all men” – not all men are like that, not all men feel like that, not all men do that, etc.

Music Tuesday

I spent a lot of today organizing the sprawling mess my music library has become over the years, copying it to my new PC, importing it into Rhythmbox (iTunes, but for Linux) and trying to find my way around Rhythmbox (because it’s really not iTunes, even if it looks very similar, and completely different in how to handle it). My brain still feels clogged and numb with renaming and moving files.

But it was worth it – I have music now. Music is important to me. That feels slightly weird to say, considering I’m not even horribly musical and don’t play any instrument, but it’s true.

When I was ten or so, I had a few books with collections of Christian short stories, and one of them was about someone finding a huge archive of everything they had done in their life so far: files documenting all the books they’d read, all the people they’d talked to, all the sexual thoughts they’d ever had, and so on. The point of the story was the almost empty drawer containing a list of the (very few) people they had told about Jesus, but some time before that, they found a drawer of all the music they had ever listened to – I remember how excited I was about that drawer, and how much I wished I had such a drawer so I could look up all the titles of the music I’d ever heard without knowing their titles. The story’s protagonist then went on to say how ashamed they were of wasting so much time on music they could have used to get closer to God (or something like that). I remember well how utterly indignant I was – time spent listening to music was not wasted!

I pretty much still feel that way. Music is easy to combine with other activities (organizing music, for example, or transit, or brushing my teeth, or doing housework, and of course going for walks and working out), and it’s so versatile! Depending on the tracks I choose (or let shuffle choose for me), I can put myself into almost any emotional state: screaming defiance, mindfulness and wonder at the world, deep grief, steely determination, relaxation so complete all my muscles feel like liquid, comfort and solace, awe, energized defiance and rebellion, bubbling joy, and others I’ve forgotten to mention. It’s certainly a greater range of emotions, and more depth of each of them, than I usually experience in my non-musical day-to-day life.

And being able to have music for all those emotions of course also means I can manage them, or at least manage them better than without music: I can find an angry, fast song to cope with my anger, indulge in it for the five minutes or so it lasts, and then feel cleansed and more grounded than before, without blowing up at anyone or anything or bottling it up inside me. I can feel desperate and alone and find a song expressing either the same emotion or a complementary one (comfort, kindness, warmth), and either will make me feel calmer, supported, understood and validated.

In sum, music is good.

And it seems fitting to end this post with some music, but choosing a single song seems impossible, so I’ll leave you with five choices:

• For something light and happy, listen to Waterflame – Glorious Morning
• If you feel like you want to rage and smash everything and burn the world, listen to Otep – Run For Cover
• If you feel rebellious, but in a less destructive and more mischievous way, listen to Naughty (from the muscal Matilda)
• If you feel like crying and maybe also killing yourself, and you need a friend, listen to Twenty One Pilots – Truce
• and if none of those fit, here’s Beats Antique – Spiderbite so I don’t leave you empty-handed

The right direction

[I wrote this yesterday, but had connection troubles and therefore couldn’t post it. Technology seems to have conspired against me lately.]

I have trouble with left and right.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate: I am fine with left and right. I just have trouble with “left” and “right”.

Ask me which hand I write with, and my right hand will shoot up without hesitation. Ask me which of my feet points downhill when I’m strapped to my snowboard, and I’ll indicate my left as soon as you’ve finished the question. Ask me which side a horse is supposed to walk on when you’re leading it, or which hands of two riders are supposed to meet when they’re passing one another, and I’ll point to my right or raise my left hand with perfect confidence.
But tell me to turn right at the next traffic light, and suddenly my brain will stutter and stumble into darkness and have to feel for stepping stones to use: okay, they said right, I am right-handed, that means I write with my right hand, that’s this hand, okay, so this is right, I need to turn into this direction!
Ask me to answer any of the above questions in words rather than gestures and I’ll have to follow the same steps back, with my reaction time suffering accordingly. When I was a child, I used a small red spot on my left thumb to help me, and when I got older I moved on to slightly more abstract (and less visible) stepping stones like the ones above, but it never became easier or more automatic. I still use the same strategy to match simple, one-syllable words I’ve known all my life (or at least most of it) to the corresponding directions.

I’ve never really thought about it until a few months when a blogger described how a friend of hers could not tell left from right, and so when they were driving, she’d say “my window” and “your window” instead of “left” and “right”.
Since then, my mind has been blown. Both because that’s a really brilliant strategy that I really really need to adopt (and tell all my potential passengers to adopt, because it might greatly enhance our chances of reaching our destination), and because the whole issue seemed so weird once I thought about it in more detail. “My window” and “right” mean the exact same thing in this case (so much so that I knew which direction was which without further explanation), and yet one delivers a result quickly and without conscious thought, and the other one makes me seek out my mental stepping stones.

In most cases, whether one uses “left” or some other term/phrase doesn’t matter much: as long as there is some shared representation of the corresponding direction (whether it’s a car surrounding us both, shared knowledge of horse-riding etiquette, or something else), we can communicate effectively and efficiently without “left” and “right”. In some cases, it might even be more effective overall: if we’re standing in my room facing each other, “turn to the window” is a far more efficient way to communicate than a term for relative directions, since we don’t share the relative directions in this case.
In any case, using alternative terms definitely benefits those of us for whom “left” and “right” are slippery.  Insisting that they are the correct ways to describe directions and therefore no others should ever be used seems nonsensical and needlessly antagonistic to me: language exists to put names to concepts (objects, experiences,…) and communicate with others regarding said concepts (objects, experiences,…), and when it doesn’t fulfill one of these purposes (and/or fulfills the other one only inadequately) in a given situation, there is no good reason to cling to it rather than discard it in favor of better alternatives.