So. This is something I’ve never talked to anyone in my real life about, but for whatever reason I’m more comfortable asking a bunch of strangers on the internet for advice. Deep breath.
I am coming up on 40yo, and since I was 16 I’ve mostly been in dedicated heterosexual relationships. I have always considered myself a cis male and maybe a little bi but things are… changing rapidly, I guess. I am single for the first time in years all this freedom and time means I’m doing some long overdue introspection. I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly happy with my body or my gender. I am finding myself much more attracted to people with penises, and more importantly, I am finding myself wanting to play a different, more submissive maybe, role in the bedroom. I finally have an opportunity to try new and different things with all sorts of different people, and that’s sort of exciting, but I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing or even what I’m feeling.
I see a lot of trans folks self-actualizing and I’m super happy for them. I envy them for knowing what they want. I don’t know what I want and it’s driving me a little crazy lately. I would kill to have that level of knowledge of who I wanted to be. I am not a particularly masculine man, but I don’t think I feel like I would be more comfortable being more traditionally feminine, though that doesn’t necessarily repulse me, either. I would certainly be happier with less body hair. When I was I kid I wanted to be a robot. Now as an adult I maybe just want to be a robot who fucks occasionally, gender irrelevant. Fully functional, you might say. I don’t really know what to do with that feeling, though.
Any advice on how to navigate literally any of this would be awesome. I feel like a teenager again, no idea how any of this works or where to even begin. I don’t have the knowledge or the language to talk coherently about any of this stuff, and certainly no experience. I am doing my best you guys but all of this is confusing as fuck.
Not speaking for Sop here because they seemed to be making a different point about how the OP talked about “people with penises” in a generalized way that lumped together the sexual dominance role men often play in sexual roles, essentially it implies a kind of stereotyping.
But to add some more context:
A lot of people think the genitals determine someone’s “true” sex or gender, and these gender-essentializing notions about genitals can create problems for trans people.
Lots of trans women have penises, but that doesn’t mean their penis makes them men, or that their penis functions like a man’s penis.
Penises become so associated with masculinity that people have a hard time separating the two, and the inability of some people to take seriously the idea of a trans woman’s penis being truly a woman’s genitals can not only be upsetting for the woman, but a kind of trans-denying / oppressive mindset about how sex and gender works.
So when a person is really into the penis on a woman, it can sometimes feel like what is attractive about that is that the penis is a masculine penis on a woman, not attraction to the woman’s genitals that happen to be a penis. In this scenario, they aren’t seeing the woman’s penis as an unusually large clit (for example), but instead as like a man’s penis, but on a woman’s body. This indicates a way of seeing the genitals and gender of the person that is invalidating.
In this scenario, it’s not the attraction to the penis itself that makes the person “bad”, it’s the way they see the penis that invalidate the gender of the woman that is “bad”. It doesn’t have to be hyper-sexual or prevy to be invalidating, the core issue here is about how the genitals are being interpreted and seen in the sexual dynamic.
One way this can come up, for example, is the expectation that the trans woman play a dominating and penetrative sexual role, essentially taking the role of a man in sex.
This of course is all messy because plenty of trans women enjoy domming, penetrating, or using their penis in a “masculine” way, and of course the assumptions we have about men and women and what roles they play in the bedroom are not reality, it is a normative script that we cater to, but which is arbitrary.
But at the same time, lots of people who want trans women to take on those stereotypically masculine roles might then also be engaged in a way of thinking about sex, gender, and genitals that is not healthy or trans-accepting.
Some of this ground is covered in the ContraPoints video about whether it’s gay for straight men to be attracted to trans women: is there something gay about loving a body that has a penis? (TW: trans slur in the video title.)
Thank you for the long explanation!
So mostly it boils down to perceived possible shittyness, I guess?
I probably need to think about all this more. Thanks for the video, and for the record, I couldn’t care less if I “feel gay” about something I like, but it is minefield I feel, because people are people and some consider those things like it’s important I guess.
Well, lots if thoughts, thanks again!
I don’t think it boils down to perceived possible shittyness, it’s that the reasons people have for liking the penis are usually that it’s male, and because they are attracted in some ways to men.
This comes up a lot with self-described straight men who don’t want to admit they have sexual feelings for men, so they sublimate that attraction onto a woman who happens to have “male” genitals.
And it’s relevant if it’s “gay” because it shows how you’re thinking about the genitals, if it’s gay to have sex with a trans woman it implies the penis is male and the woman’s gender is undone by this.
We also see this kind of behavior with labels like “men who have sex with men” - so many men are unwilling to admit they could have sexual attraction to men.
I see where you are coming from, and I appreciate this explanation. I apologize if that’s how I came across. The phrasing was poor and I did not intend to conflate sexual attraction and gender. Two separate things that I am dealing with simultaneously, lol. The one sort of led into the other. I chose the phrasing about penises because I did not want to exclude trans women, but I see how it could be problematic. As Valmond said, it does appear that my attraction seems to be with the penis itself and less with whatever gender has said penis equipped, and I recognize that does not determine or necessarily influence my own gender expression. The internet is a difficult place to have thoughtful conversations, and I really appreciate your well-thought out and helpful response.
I think you meant to respond to Sop, I personally didn’t find your statement about being attracted to people with penises offensive.
You know yourself better than I do, but I don’t know that it’s so easy to be certain where attraction to a penis comes from, and I think there are plenty of pressures to deny gendered associations with the penis in this context, especially after all this discussion about the importance of not seeing it as male. Not everything going on in your psychology is transparent to you, I would just remain open and sensitive to your feelings as they come up - it’s a complicated time for you and it’s better to be listening to yourself than trying to strangle unorthodox feelings, if that makes sense.