At my college (may it rest in peace), there was an annual party called Kiss Your Crush Wall. If you wore green, you were open to people asking to kiss you. Red meant please don’t, and yellow theoretically meant something other than please don’t, but in practice also meant please don’t.
Anyway, one year I wore a devastating green dress and got kissed by like, 30 people. Lots of boys, lots of girls, probably some people who, by now, go by neither. It was great.
Another time, I went to a party (maybe a Daft Punk concert?) in nearby hellhole Ybor City.1 I wore a red dress to this one. It wasn’t even particular flattering. But one lady shoved a one dollar bill down my back, clearly eager to get to perform that ritual of vaguely denigrating lust to someone of her preferred sex.
This was the early 2010s, and nobody seemed to think I was a woman in these situations. I think I came off as a man with the Lust PVP flag2 on. And indeed, people welcomed the invitation to lust.
Okay…?
There is a certain stripe of gender lament that goes something like this:
Once upon a time, I naively thought that love was love, and that men and women were sexually attracted to each other in roughly the same way. But in fact, the way I lust after the opposite sex is fundamentally different to the way the opposite sex, even if I were hot, would lust after me. So my desire to be reciprocally desired is not just frustrated, but impossible.
This lament can come from many directions. Trans people explaining their pre-transition desire to be loved differently. Cynical dudes saying that if you ever cry in front of your wife, for any reason, she’ll develop the Ick and you’ll lose Everything in the Divorce. Hard-noised Quillette style realists who mock blank-slate utopians.3
But anyway, it’s false.
The Stupid Graphs
At this point, I am legally obligated to show you a graph like this.
This is a graph of a sex difference in the human brain. Two things about it are true:
Men’s brains have, on average, more connectivity between brain regions
The difference is so small that if you take a random woman and a random man, you have almost no idea whose brain is more connected
I doubt this metric matters, by the way. It’s just an example of a case where, despite the fact that there is a measurable sex difference, in practice that difference isn’t that informative. Compare this to, say, height:
If someone’s 7’6, they’re almost certainly a man. If someone’s 5’0, they’re probably a woman. But unless someone is very short or very tall, it’s hard to say. My sister, for example, is (like me) 6’3.
My claim is that it’s true that men and women experience lust somewhat differently on average, and of course the experience of lust is multidimensional and wacky and embarrassing for everybody, but that the degree of difference is surmountable. It’s a little more like brain region connectivity, I posit, than like height. And it’s nothing like “adolescent grip strength,” where the curves are practically distinct.
Back From Graph Land
Okay, you may say, fine. Perhaps (many) women do have pent up “male-style” lust where they stare at men’s butts and lick their lips wolfishly, and (many) men have hidden “woman-style” lust where they learn an otherwise plain lady is rich and powerful and swoon onto a fainting couch. But from your examples near the beginning, you were crossdressing both times! In normal, daily life, outside of weird gender presentations that might encourage people to be fetishistic, do people lean into gender-unusual attractions?
In my experience, yes! Like, I once dated a girl who wrote a bunch of somewhat lascivious poems about my body, hid them around some restaurants I frequented as a scavenger hunt, and when I followed the trail of clues I ended up in my own bedroom, where she was waiting with a glass of wine. My wife frequently waxes poetic about my thighs, and says we should hang a nude painting of me on our bedroom wall. Meanwhile, I write sappy love letters on anniversaries, and poutily worry that my wife might not remember one is coming around until she’s cutting it rather close.4
And lest you think I am only bragging about my own malewaif exploits (though yes, I am totally doing that), I once lived with a guy dramatically hotter than me, and holy shit did he have girls lusting after him. In fact, he complained about how the girls he matched with on Tinder were too sexual too fast, and given I was in a serious relationship and he wanted to be, I think he meant it.
To some degree, I think lust is a two-player improv game, and it takes the shape that works within a given relationship context. I want to be rescued from spiders and babied when I’m sick, and my wife wants to be brave and strong and catch lizards in her bare hands. That we found each other is a delight, but not a coincidence. If I’d internalized the belief that no woman would ever want to rescue me from a spider, and curled in on myself, I probably would have had a harder time.
xoxo,
Your Delicate Flower Blogger
I am sorry if you live in Ybor City. As far as I know parts of it are lovely. The part I went to was the party zone, the Ybor City equivalent of Bourbon Street, and it was a nightmare.
A PVP flag is, from multiplayer online gaming, a thing you can trigger that lets other players (who are also flagged) attack you. So people with them on can fight each other, while players who opt out can safely do their own thing.
Didn’t understand that last one? Congratulations! Please do not look any of it up.
Yes, both anniversaries: when we got married and when we first kissed. And heavens no, I don’t remind her, that would be cheating.