An Evolutionary Reason You Get Off From Getting Head

One of my many flaws is reading far too many pop science books and drawing conclusions. Here's one such conclusion, drawn after receiving something of an overshare from a friend:

I think we evolved to feel pleasure getting head because it fights STDs.  Not kidding.

I'm not quite talking about the lower incidence of HIV transmission from oral sex as opposed to vaginal or anal sex, or the claim that saliva carries a sparser population of the HIV virus. Though that is certainly interesting.

I'm talking about saliva's generally antibiotic properties.  Like, if you're trapped in the desert and you cut yourself, you should probably spit on it.  For an entertaining discussion about the many capabilities of saliva, check out Mary Roach's Gulp.  Since Mary Roach has editors, I assume I can use this antibiotic property as a baseline.  Now for a little story.

My friend [Bella] is dating a newish girl, been a couple months.  They see each other weekly or thereabouts at this stage, and the oral sex is great.  Suddenly, Bella finds herself with what she suspects is a UTI. Seems they've been riding dirty.  Now there's a dilemma, she says.  Should she tell this girl not to go down there and miss out on the VERY excellent head, or do just keep her mouth shut and risk an infection but enjoy the face-ride?

My response will anger fundamentalist Islamists, Baptists, ancient Roman senators and perhaps certain Jews alike: Definitely let her eat it!  Tell her to lap it wet.  Mary Roach says saliva is like a microbial brigade of awesomeness.  It might make it better!

Worth a shot, we concluded. 

And it worked! UTI faded with more-frequent head.

So now, armed with this singular piece of anecdotal evidence, I've begun to wonder... Is this a novel trick?

Take, for example, two prehistoric women, one who really enjoys - craves - oral sex and one who doesn't care for it any more than doggy style or whatever.  If there's an antibacterial effect to having someone salivate all over your pussy, wouldn't natural selection pick the lady who craves head?

That's even if the head doesn't easily lead to procreation...

I think oral would similarly clean house for men.  Especially with those old diseases they used to have before humans made medicines that made the diseases sturdier.  So why not crave it?  It's good for you, you were born to love it!  That's one more thing religions get wrong about sexuality.

Transgender Summer Camp

If you are an 11 year old born with a penis who likes to dress in makeup and pink dresses, there's a camp for you.  The only sad part is that I can't tell you where to find it, because it's name and location have to stay secret to protect the campers.

Credit: Lindsay Morris

The owner calls it "You for You," which isn't the real name, but it is the real idea.  The idea is that if you are the parent of a gender nonconforming child, you can come to this camp with your child and allow your biologically male child to participate in beauty pageants and wear heels with other kids who like to do the same thing.  Nobody's judging them.

Bu my favorite part of the whole article describing this heretofore-secret camp is that the manager doesn't expect (or encourage or discourage) these kids to grow up to be any particular way.  She accepts that some may want gender reassignment surgery one day just as she accepts that some will stop wearing girls clothes in the next few years, marry women, and identify as straight at 30.

She doesn't think of gender as polar and permanent, and that's exactly what the rest of us need to notice.  Because her point of view allows these kids to be really happy. (Check out her photos, because these kids do look like they're having a blast).

I painted Blanche Devereaux with an erection and wrote No Church in the Wild to make the same point.  We have to stop thinking about gender and sexuality in terms of permanent polarities that don't really apply.  It's much easier for a boy who wants to dress as a girl to say "I feel like wearing heels today" than it is to say "I want to be a girl forever."  Just because the former is true doesn't mean the latter is.  Describing only the present circumstances is much easier and much more honest than "coming out" as an identity or orientation.  And it's much easier for us bisexuals to say "I want to date this [same-sex person] right now," which is about an action, than to say, "I'm a bisexual," which is a lifetime label with a number of nasty connotations that discourage the vast majority of bisexuals from ever coming out or using it.

So let's talk about our actions, now, instead of trying to cabin ourselves into permanent identities.

Reply to Anonymous

Due to technical difficulties, I'm responding to the following comment via post:

Anonymous1:29 PM

Do you identify as both cis gender and gender queer in this posting?

I have don't favor labels, generally.  I am comfortable with my body in my birth gender most of the time and would never want to remove my breasts, though sometimes I desperately wish I had a penis.  I exhibit many "masculine" behavioral characteristics, but I don't think that I act "like a boy" when I watch football, I think I act like a person who likes football.  So it's fair to say it's inconsistent to refer to myself with both labels - "gender queer" and "cisgender" - but in some circumstances both could be said to apply.  That's the problem with labels, I guess.

Cynthia Nixon Speaks

Lovely quote from her piece in the documentary The Out List:

"There are a lot of people who really don't believe people when they say they're bisexual, so I try to avoid the bisexual label because it just brings so much grief down on you.  People think you're faking, wishy washy, or people think you're a sex addict or something who doesn't wanna make up their mind, I wanna be a political fighter, and I wanna be in there fighting, so I call myself gay.  And certainly I'm delighted to be in the gay club.  People all the time talk about you know when I came out, but I don't feel like I came out.  I feel like I fell in love with someone and that person was a woman, and I don't wanna minimize that in any way.  What I'm attracted to about Christine is her butchness and her gayness.  But I didn't feel like all of a sudden there was a part of me that was denied or living in the shadows that finally could come out. gay people are fighting really really hard for our civil rights.  What's important is that the world looks at all of us and sees us as gay and so we need to be cohesive and we need to fight...it can't be us and them anymore, we have to understand, we're all us."

Let Me Explain Myself

I painted a gay boy's aroused figured with a face reminiscent of Blanche Devereaux for a reason, as I've explained before.  In response, I got an uproar of vicious Facebook messages.  Some claimed that I had insulted the actress with my work.  Some claimed that it was trash and I was not activist, just a "cockroach."  I've never been called a cockroach before.  Fortunately, some members of the community spoke up to say they appreciated the message I was sending.

So now I want to explain a bit about why I chose to send that message.

It certainly wasn't meant to insult the actress. The character of Blanche Devereaux was a childhood idol of mine, and I've often noted that it was my idolatry of Blanche that made me feel comfortable exercising my hypersexual tendencies.  [Bobby], the model, felt the same way.  This painting is a celebration of the love and taste he and I share for Golden Girls, and Blanche in particular.

But I assumed most people would find the painting at least a little disturbing.  Why?  Because the image feels "wrong" or "gross" to a cisgender person - one who feels they are physically and mentally their birth gender - because it mixes genders in a way that puts them off.  For a transgender person, they could see this SAME kind of "disturbing" or "disgusting" disconnect when they look at the bodies they were born with in the mirror because they feel so alienated from their birth gender (more on why/how science explains that trans and cisgender persons are born as a result of the same quirks of the gestation processes in a moment).  So, imagine taking any disturbing sensations you got from this painting to the bathroom mirror with you every single morning.

One guy on the web accused me of making the word "cisgender" up when I told him why I made this painting.  I assure you, I did not.  It has been used academically for quite a while.  I didn't know the term myself until recently because I am cisgender and never had a reason to define myself as different until I began interacting more deeply with the trans community as a result of No Church in the Wild.  Cisgender is just an academic way of referring to persons whose birth gender and "psychological gender" match, as opposed to trans or gender queer persons who identify as a different psychological gender.  "Cisgender" is left off most speech for the same reason "white" might be: Most of society would say "I saw a man running" if they meant a white dude but would say "I saw a black man running" if they meant a black dude.

A cisgender bias is a manner of thinking of the world with reference to persons who feel a "match" - as a white person sees the world without reference to the difficulties minorities experience -  but I'd argue that oftentimes parts can match and parts cannot.  As I have argued with my painting of Bobby as Blanche, which is a physical male's embodiment of a female-stereotyped persona. 

You may have noticed that I'm opposed to dichotomies like "gay vs. straight" and "male vs. female."  In my scale of sexuality fingerprints,  I use "active to passive" instead of "male vs. female." A human's graph point on the fingerprint mold below moves according to the extent to which one is "same-sex interested to opposite-sex interested" - or, "hypersexual to asexual."  Each rating is just a point along an axis, an one's graph point may change over time as our brains age.  I don't have a point for "Trans to cis" gender because I don't think personality/sexuality characteristics need to be thought of in terms of gender at all to understand sexuality (or sexual compatibility).  Here's where the figure in my previous painting of Blanche Devereaux with Giant Boner falls on the graph, with the curve representing the range necessary because the face and boy have different birth genders.

Birth gender is set by your genes during your first trimester as a fetus.  The traits that place a human in a particular spot on this graph all develop later in gestation, across genders, when the makeup of the fetal brain is structured, in part, by androgens.  Androgens are sex hormones (estrogen, testosterone, etc) coursing through a pregnant woman, and they depend on the mother's environment, mood, biology, etc rather than the child's sex.  Specifically, later brain development, when we get traits like aggression built into our neurons - which people often simply identify as a birth gender trait - is guided by the mother's androgen levels rather than the child's sex.  I've blogged before about the scientists who first made this claim and suggested why it explains my bisexuality and my gender queer traits.  If you don't think in terms of birth gender, Blanche doesn't look so creepy.

So, I've painted to make the world aware of how deep-seated their misconceptions and biases of gender really are.  If you hate it, I hope you'll at least think about why.