Variety, specifically of the sexual kind

I've been reading the guide to sex that I got at my bachelorette party and there seems to be a pretty consistent theme throughout so far: everyone is different. Different things work differently for each person. There is a very wide range of what's "normal" and no two people are going to react sexually in the same way.

After reading for a while, I got to thinking about variety in people. The book is keeping the topics pretty closely targeted towards sex related things, but it got me thinking about non-sexual things as well. Are people that diverse in terms of, say, how they hold a pencil? How they answer the phone? How they look? I think they are that diverse, but we don't really treat them that way. In fact, we love to categorize things and lump them together as much as possible. People sometimes spends inordinate amounts of time studying a particular field (ornithology, for example) in order to tell the difference between things that we automatically group as the same.

The thing that's so interesting about this sex book is that a lot of the premade categories aren't there. Our culture in general (and certainly me in specific) is somewhat ignorant about sex. It's not really a topic that's often open for discussion, or at least, the acceptable forums in which to talk about it are a little limited. In most daily life, categories are very readily available. We hold stereotypes about races and professions and hair color and clothing and all sorts of things. All of these stereotypes and categories are pretty common knowledge. Most small children are aware of them. But is there a stereotype for the shape of a vagina? How much pubic hair a person should have? Women who wear tampons vs pads? There aren't really any convenient categories for most sex related things. Sure there are generalizations people make based on sexual orientation and penis size and a few other sex related things, but most sexual variation I don't think we have easy labels for or preconceptions about. It's probably because it's just not talked about in our culture. I think this is why I was initially so struck by the variety. When I think about it, there's really not that much more variety in sex than there is in the rest of human existence, but I feel almost trained not to see the differences in other aspects of my life.

I have sometimes wondered what life would be like if we didn't have categories for things. I believe stereotypes are a useful and necessary tool, but generalizations like that can never be fully accurate, and their inaccuracies are often harmful to the people being grouped together. Most people recognize the negative aspects of stereotypes and often protest against them, but they really are important for us to function. But I often question things. I often wonder, "What if we didn't have them? What would that be like?" After looking a little more closely at the under-discussed topic of sex, I feel like I have a small glimmer of that. Categories and generalizations are still there, but this book has remarkably fewer generalizations about its topics than most other things I've read.

So what's it feel like to have fewer generalizations? My first reaction was relief. I don't think I had realized how much I was trying to fit into generalizations that I wasn't even aware of. Everyone wants to be normal, but when you don't know what normal is, it can be somewhat stressful, often without you even realizing the cause of the stress. I always felt kind of weird about sex, probably because I didn't really know where I stood. This book described a wide range of normal, and I was relieved to find that I fell within it.

My second reaction came after I stopped worrying about where I was in respect to normal and started looking at what normal was. Normal is huge! It's to the point of almost being intimidating. There's such a wide variety of things that you don't know what to do or how to act. There was a section on testosterone that said some men get calmer with more testosterone and some men get more aggressive. There's a section on kissing that describes some things people like, but in the same breath explains that some people hate those same things. The lack of generalizations or truisms is kind of intimidating. I don't think I ever realized how reassuring those could be, how calming it feels to think "oh so that's what I'm supposed to do." It's kind of like a how to book that says "it could be this, or it could be the exact opposite, or anything in between." Not exactly a how to book I'd recommend. So much of the book says that you just have to find out for yourself what your partner and, even worse, you yourself are in to. It's almost like being told to reinvent the wheel. There are tips and pointers, but really it's up to you to figure out.

Of course that is the way it has to be. Everyone really is that different. Generalizations of things that work would certainly be reassuring and might in fact ease the learning curve a little bit, but they would be less accurate and there's a real tendency to get stuck in generalizations sometimes. You really have to fight to tell yourself that stereotypes aren't true and you really have to work to combat your generalizing instincts. Also, people tend to conform to their own categories, reinforcing them even more.

This brings up an interesting point about our culture's discomfort about sex. If we were more open about it and talked about it more, generalizations would form. They'd have to. If it was acceptable to ask someone casually when you first meet what their favorite sex position is or whether or not they shave their pubes, you would probably start hearing more generalizations about those things. Maybe people who shave their crotch would be thought of as high maintenance or anal and people who didn't shave would be thought of as neanderthalic or lazy, while people who trimmed would be normal. And then even trimming could be categorized into different styles the way that hair styles are, some serious, some playful, some formal, some casual. I know this analogy is getting to the point of absurd, but you get the idea. If we really were as open about sex as we are about hair or clothing or even race, sex would be exactly the same as all of those things. There would be stereotypes, generalizations, people who were typecast (more than they currently are, that is). As scary as it kind of is to explore the less generalized world of sex, it's kind of freeing too. You don't really know what you'll find, nor do you know what to think about it when you do, but that's kind of exciting in a way. I'm not often a fan of puritanical mindsets, but in a way, all the repression has opened a space where people can be far more liberated and less restricted. In general I think the repression just represses people, but if you get past that, there's a lot for you to discover. You don't know what to expect, and in a way, you can't know what to expect because there are few things common enough that most people have been exposed to it and influenced by it. I have to admit, I wouldn't want that level of uncertainty in every aspect of my life, but having it in one doesn't sound like such a bad thing.