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At the beach...

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Sexuality - a Tale of Evolution, Sex, and Society

Part I - Introduction

Abruptly around the age of 30, I was rudely awakened from my peaceful sexual slumber. I was doing just fine, completely oblivious to what amounted to the wholeness of my sexuality. It was sort of like being on the Titanic, happily sailing along, when suddenly in the middle of the night you are tossed from your bed because your indestructible ship hit what appeared to be a small block of ice. Well it turns out that your heteronormative world view “ship" is quite easily ripped apart by the deep but hidden 90% of your sexuality “iceberg”.

For me it all happened just like that. Except I wasn't on a ship and I didn’t sink to the bottom of the ocean, that was all a metaphor. Yet it did happen in the middle of the night and it all occured inexplicably due to the fact that I had no idea I was bisexual. Even worse, I thought I never – EVER felt attracted to women. Now, after analyzing my whole life and scrutinizing every female to female interaction I ever had, I know better. It seems there were signals and things I was doing / giving off without noticing them myself but others were picking up on. Sexual things. In fact, when I talked to some people they were like, “Yup, you were totally flirting". This left me shocked most of all. I think I should have had a plethysmograph installed. I think most women should! This topic I will bring up later when I talk about the amazing and incredibly genius Dr. Meredith Chivers.

Without diving deep into the details of the instance of my awakening, I will just give a brief synopsis. A young girl who had become my friend and was way more woke to her (and my) sexuality, opened my eyes one evening, spurring me to go on a personal journey of self discovery that took me over a year just so I could come to terms with myself. Then after accepting who I was I began to investigate the world around me with new, clearer, and purer lenses.

To everyone reading this and shaking their heads in disapproval, I’m sorry, but the world is neither as simple nor as complex as you think it is.

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Another photo of me…

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Here’s another photo of me… I blurred it out on purpose 😆

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Sexuality - a Tale of Evolution, Sex, and Society

Part III - Defining Love and Sexual Attraction

Today, Love is defined as a strong feeling attraction and affection between two people. The Ancient Greeks loved (no pun intended) to analyze, categorize, theorize, and philosophize the hell out of everything. So it comes as no surprise that we have 4 types of love.

1. Agape (Αγάπη / agapi) is the selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional love. This love is sometimes described as perfect love.

2. Storge (στοργή / storgi) is empathetic and protective love. This is like Maternal love.

3. Philia (φιλία/ filia) is the friendship and brotherly love

4. Eros (έρως/ eros) is the sexual love. (But not always)

A person can have one, many, or all of these types of loves for another person. They may have these loves for more than one person. One can clearly see, that the most ancient sub-definitions of love have no limitation on gender or number of who may love whom. It is also interesting to note that Ancient Greeks, although monogamous in marriage, did not have a term for husband or wife, just man and woman with the proper possessive pronoun coming before or after. Monogamy for men in Ancient Greece meant having 1 legitimate Woman to run the household and have legitimate children with, while having sex with as many prostitutes, slaves, and other men as you liked. Monogamy for women meant having 1 Man to represent you in politics, protect you from other men, and to have sex with for bearing children, while having sex with other women was just fine. They were never considered homosexuals or bisexual, just people.

Homosexual, Heterosexual, Gay, Bisexual, and Lesbian are terms that may have some Greek origin or meaning but ALL were created much much later than the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations had gone and were replaced by other more puritanical ones. In fact Ancient Greeks and Romans never labeled anyone with these terms. A man who had sex with a man, a woman, or both was just a man. A woman who had sex with a man, a woman, or both was just a woman. Now if they frowned upon these actions is a completely different topic, and honestly it depended on who you asked, when, and in what part of the world.

So Homosexuals, defined as such in 1869, are people who have sex or romantic feelings towards people of the same sex. Heterosexuals, as defined in 1933, are people sexually attracted to the opposite sex. Heterosexuality until then was a term to define a psychological state of “morbid sexual passion for the opposite sex", whatever that means. Gay began to mean homosexual men in the 1960’s when they self identified as such because until then it meant bright, showy, and carefree. Lesbians, as defined in 1890, are women who are homosexual. This word refers to the island of Lesbos which was the home of Sappho who wrote erotic poetry about other women. Bisexuals, again labeled in the late 19th century, are people who are attracted to, romantically and or sexually, to both sexes.

I really dislike using these labels, a man is just a man and a woman is just a woman irrespective of who they are attracted to or have sexual relations with. Humanity survived thousands and even millions of years without these labels, but it seems we really needed them the last hundred years or so. We must have needed them so much that today I am not a woman, I am a cisgender biromantic bisexual female. It makes me feel like scientific experiment or an illness. Yet in order to make this analysis easier I will use these labels.

I would like to add here the term transexual for definitions sake. A transexual, labeled in 1923, is someone who feels that they belong to the opposite sex that they were born into.

Men are defined as those with both 1 Y and at least 1 X chromosome (most are XY), women have at least 2 X chromosomes (most are XX). Survivable trisomies are extremely rare but do not change gender, and true clinical intersex people are 0.018% of the population. Yet these people do exist and have a role in today's society.

Men and women are roughly 50% of the world population each. Yet of we look back 8,000 years we see that for every 1 man that passed on his gene’s, 17 women did. This means that from the time of birth until reproduction 16 boys died or where somehow taken out of the gene pool. This is a very important factor we will come back to later.

It is worth noting that Homosexual men are 10% of the male population, and homosexual women are 10% of the female population. Bisexual men are about 5% and bisexual women about 10%. These numbers are from self reporting polls and try to take into account underreporting.

Yet another poll tells us that 33% of women have had some sort of sexual contact with another woman (be it just kissing or something more), and 60% of Heterosexual women have fantasized about having sex with other women.

Now here is something amazing that my hero Meredith Chivers, uncovered. When monitored, 100% of women were aroused by watching other women be naked, masturbate, or have sex (with each other with men). Men, hetero and homo-sexual, as well as lesbians on the other hand did not vary much at all from their self reporting. A little while ago I would have fallen into the last category, hetero in my mind and with no clue my vaginal pulse, blood, and fluid flow was aroused by the alluring curves of another woman. Why? I believe it is because women for so long have been taught to ignore their nature. Why are most women naturally attracted to both women and men? Well Meredith Chivers and her team are busy trying to figure this out. Yet, I believe that it just comes down to evolution.

How Dr. Chivers made this breakthrough discovery is by monitoring the genitals of men and women using a plethysmograph I mentioned earlier. Most of the “Heterosexual” women self reported they were not aroused by the other women or by lesbian sex but their vaginas told a totally different story.

The conflict between women's minds and bodies began, in my opinion, less than 1000 years ago, while their natural ability to freely traverse the gender spectrum must be hundreds of thousands of years old. This ability must have begun when paleolithic prehistoric women were living and working together as the men left for days to go hunting or raiding. Human's closest primate cousin the bonobo apes, have female to female sex for social reasons as well as for fun. Is it too far fetched to imagine that we did it as well? We did, and there is plenty of evidence for it, yet it is mostly ignored.

Coming Tomorrow:

Part IV - Troubled Tribal Love

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Incognito…

hihihi

♡Alexa T♡