quizzical pussy

She's measuring.

My hair is currently– for the first time ever– short enough to easily determine which direction the whorl goes. It opens up a whole world of possibilities. Like, I can finally figure out whether I’m a gay man or not.

In the early to mid aughts we started hearing about research that suggested that more gay men had counterclockwise hair whorls (about 23%) than one finds in the general population (about 8%). This accompanied other modern-day phrenology like relative finger lengths, thumbprint ring density, left-handedness, that all seemed to correlate (according to some studies) in varying degrees with gayness.

But it seems like the finger length and whorl things are trotted out most often, probably because you can compare them more easily in a social setting, but they’re subtler than left-hand dominance. Can you imagine saying, “Oh, you’re left handed! Surely you’re gay!” It would be absurd! But I’ve heard people say that a counterclockwise whorl means someone’s gay, having a longer index than ring finger means that you like guys, or having a longer ring finger means you’re attracted to women.

I don’t know about you, but by varying the pitch of my fingers slightly I can make either one look longer, although I think my index finger is slightly longer, which means OH GOD I’M NOT REALLY A BISEXUAL! I also have a clockwise whorl and I’m right-handed. Oh, god. But actually, no one seems to study the physical differences in the bisexual population. I guess they’re just waiting for us to make up our minds.

I feel like things get dangerous when the public gets a hold of data from (more or less) scientific studies or surveys. Holly’s post on Monday points out a perfect example of this phenomenon, discussing some article that dimly justifies tired gender stereotypes with the decrees of some monolithic entity call science, which doesn’t appear to function quite like any actual scientific community I’ve ever heard of.

Take the whorl thing. The only study I’m aware of that examines the population of counterclockwise whorls on homosexual heads occurred at a Pride Festival in Southern California. Its sample size was about 50 men, which isn’t large enough to “prove” much of anything. We could say that the study suggests that gay men may be more apt to have counterclockwise whorls, but without actually knowing if there was adequate control we could also say that counterclockwise whorls could be disproportionately represented in Southern Californians, or in extroverts, who might be more liable to attend an outdoor festival, or maybe there are more counterclockwise whorls in men who are out, but closeted men have the standard 8% of whorls. We don’t know. We didn’t do the study, and unless we have access to all the information we might just be parroting piffle.

There are reasons it would be cool if we could prove that homosexuality was genetic. All that talk about “choice” might melt away, and maybe people would stop being jerks, right? Right? Maybe. But finding a “cause” for gayness is pretty damn close to protesting that it’s “not their fault”, isn’t it? And there’s no fault anywhere, so we definitely don’t have to go looking for whom to blame. At this time in history, isolating a “gay gene”, or the non-simplistic form of the same concept, would invariably spawn a movement to cure it. Same-sex attraction existing is awesome. It adds to the rich tapestry of human experience, and I personally don’t want to be cured of it because chicks are hot.

The thing is, it makes a good story to say that there are physical “symptoms” of gayness, but as far as I’m concerned the only reliable tell is the whole “sleeping with someone of the same gender” thing, and even that can sometimes steer you wrong.

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This past fall/winter was truly a time of prodigious fucking. I say this because out of my friends and family, roughly 6,000 people have babies due this summer. It’s madness.

I don’t get the whole baby thing. My reproductive drive, my biological clock, is completely absent. I’ve never wanted kids; I’ve never even thought “maybe someday…”. I didn’t like to play with dolls as a kid (My Little Ponies FTW), I wish I were sterile now, and nothing has ever shaken my utter disinterest in baby-having. Which is weird considering that my baby-making (read: fucking) drive is insatiable and biologically you’d think those two things might be linked. I guess I just prefer orgasms to changing diapers. Actually, when you put it that way it’s not even slightly weird.

I realize that everyone is different, and evolutionarily speaking, I’m the one who’s broken here. I’m an evolutionary dead-end and all these happy mommies-to-be are passing on their genes. Still, it boggles my mind that there are people so enthusiastic about living my worst nightmare. But however hard it may be, I try to be polite when people are getting excited about their waxing bellies and baby registries and so forth, and I make an effort to listen to their thoughts on impending parenting challenges.

One of my friends (due in August, I think) is a feminist and an engineer. She’s unsure of whether she’s carrying a boy or a girl, but either way she intends to practice gender neutral parenting as far as practicality allows. Gender neutral parenting, as I understand it, tries to insulate a child from expectations to conform to gender stereotypes (e.g. girls wear princess dresses and play with dolls, boys get all the cool toys), allowing children the freedom to make up their minds about interests and preferences. This parenting style sounds awesome… idealistic, difficult, and probably frustrating at times, but awesome.

My friend mentioned several things, including the fact that she’s becoming more and more sensitive to gendered sayings like “boys will be boys”, and that she doesn’t intend to dress her child in the traditional pink or blue to denote her/his sex.

I don’t dislike pink, but I really, really dislike the practice of slapping pink on something (e.g. a cell phone, skateboard, or gun) and expecting it to automatically appeal to women. I also dislike the fact that little boys– hell, even men– are discouraged from wearing and liking pink for no good reason. Far be it from me to say that you can’t dress your little girl in pink or your little boy in blue. I don’t care how you dress your child. But I’m not sure I buy the suggestion that these are innate color preferences dictated by gender.

One study performed a few years ago by Newcastle University researchers reported that female test subjects tended to like colors at the redder end of the spectrum compared to men. Apparently because they found that this pattern was true for a handful of subjects born and raised in China, so the researchers concluded that the preference is biological. According to one of the researchers: “Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours – reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces. Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference.”

I don’t understand how you get to exclude social conditioning and cultural impact as factors just because 37 of your subjects come from a non-isolated foreign country. That seems wildly assumptive to me.

In Western society, pink=girl blue=boy is a very recent phenomenon, emerging in the last hundred years or so. More interesting still, many sources suggest that in the past these colors were reversed, and many magazines and books listed blue as the correct color for girls and pink for boys. Blue was seen as delicate, pretty, and feminine, while pink was seen as the diminutive of exuberant, manly red. The current color standard definitely doesn’t date back to the earliest flickers of civilization.

It doesn’t really matter if women generally prefer pink to blue. Maybe they’re just taught that pink is for girls, or maybe their primitive minds really are seeking out ripe berries. Maybe it’s a little of each, or maybe there’s something else altogether going on. It’s intellectually worthwhile, though, to challenge anything that reinforces cultural stereotypes by saying “we’re just wired that way”. Reducing our behaviors and thoughts to the remnants of a simpler time when all humankind was interested in was eating, fucking, and raising young is lazy. It lets us just ignore thousands of years of social pressure, and countless other variables. It’s too easy, and it’s too easily manipulated. You can end up with lots of hilarious assumptions, but often not much science.

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