Gender and Sexuality

While reading article 7, Alfred Kinsey’s quote stood out to me: “Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum” (76). In class we talked about how humans as a society, need order. Therefore, we like to organize everyone into different (gender) categories to make things easier on us. In general humans are really good at defining and promoting unattainable ideals. Not only are we good at defining certain ideals, we’re also good at making them seem achievable. An example of one such unattainable ideal would be society having only two acceptable gender categories; male and female, where mating is solely done with members of the opposite sex. Hubbard explains in her article how we as a society grow up learning about socially acceptable forms of expression based on our sexuality. These forms of expression are just unattainable ideals that society invents to instill a sense of normalcy in daily life and in our modern world these ideals can’t be achieved; males and females take on each others roles all of the time. We can’t force everyone into specific categories of gender because each person identifies differently from someone else.

In regard to why we can’t categorize gender, how one chooses to identify himself or herself stems from a desire which people cannot control. It is a recent idea that biology does not explain the object of sexual desire. Instead, desire is self-generated; “Anatomies, hormones and genes don’t tell us why we yearn for certain people” (article 7, 77). Since desire is self-generated and differs from person to person, we obviously cannot categorize gender; the range of individual identities is too wide and also too specific. Based on these new ideas about gender and how we choose to define ourselves individually, the unattainable ideals that humans promote by creating gender categories will ultimately become meaningless; it is inevitable in our changing society.

Sarah