Gender Bend-her

(this is such a cute pic of Rachel...she's normally smiling though. This must be her emo pic;-) haha)

My friend Rachel (the british chick I wrote about here) wrote something on her blog that I thought was really interesting. I know there are some of you out there who will relate, so of course, I'm sharing it:

I do not consider myself ‘straight’. Nor do I consider myself ‘gay’. I am uncomfortable with ‘bisexual’. Saying ‘I am…’ any of these things gives me a muscle-tensing feeling, that one I get when I know I’m saying something that isn’t quite true.

I have far too much of an invested interest in girls to be straight. It’s not very often that I actually have what I would call a ‘crush’ on a girl; I don’t often imagine myself dating a girl, it’s not something that I feel I’m looking for. But I would never rule it out either. I’m attracted to girls in some ways. I think most people are, even if it’s only the tiniest little thought at the back of their mind, I think it’s hard not to be in this society that makes us stare at girl’s bodies all of the time, in this society that fetishizes girls. We compare ourselves and we want to be each other and maybe sometimes that admiration of shape goes a little further.

I daydream about guys and crush on almost every guy I fleetingly meet. When I think of the future, it is males I see. But they scare me, and I haven’t worked out why that is yet. I have far too many issues with myself and my body to be very comfortable around them when I first meet them. For this reason, I don’t have many male friends, nor many male acquaintances, though I’m trying to work on this.

I don’t believe in calling myself bisexual, because I honestly don’t believe that it sums me up. To me, bisexuality is about having at least an almost equal interest in both sexes, and I just don’t. I’m interested in girls in more of a sexual way than a soppy way in all reality. But I’m willing to believe that one day I may fall in love, or just in lust, with a girl. If that happens, I have no problem with it, and I don’t want to have to have some big deal change of sexuality if that happens. To me, sexuality is a free-flowing shape-shifting thing. I understand that to others it isn’t; I’m definitely not telling you that I think everyone is bisexual, though I did ponder on that at one point. To me, giving myself a name for the way I feel is like calling myself ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, it changes, it is always at risk of changing, so why build something so concrete? I can’t read the future, I can’t know for certain how I will feel tomorrow, let alone in ten years time.

I’m interested in so much more than anatomy. I like the little things; the way someone stumbles over an explanation, or forgets to catch themselves before they expose their passion for something silly. I think there is a lot of bad press for bisexuality; many view it as a source of desperation, or a sign of promiscuity; a passing phase, or a stop on the way to ‘coming out for real’.

I’ve always felt it was restrictive to the nature of love and lust to try to bind it, section it off, call one part ‘right’ and one part ‘wrong’. In my ideal world, sexuality wouldn’t have these names, or they wouldn’t be at all important. It’s never made sense to me that anyone would discriminate based on sexuality. Because really, what does it matter who your friend is sleeping with, as long as it’s consensual? What does it matter if your work colleague dresses up at the weekend? No human is born without emotion; that is what it means to be human after all. ‘Only human’, that’s how the phrase goes, because humans cannot control their emotion. And love is one of the strongest emotions. How could that be wrong?

What do you guys think of this? Leave a comment and Rachel will check it out!

You can follow Rachel on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Rachellous