The Fifth Scale

In a previous article ("Are You Gay?") I talked about the four separate scales or continuums comprising what we sometimes simply call "sexual orientation".  (The four scales are "attraction to opposite sex", "attraction to same sex", "gender expression", and "integrity".)

Since then, I've realized there's another scale -- one which I didn't originally include because it's both obvious and unimportant.  But it's probably the one (in its over simplified binary form) which, for most people, is both the beginning and the end of any conversation about sex or gender. 

This obvious and unimportant fifth scale is anatomical:  "primary and secondary sexual characteristics" -- in other words, parts.

It's obvious because -- well, it's obvious.

It's a scale because, although statistically almost everybody has either boy-parts or girl-parts but not both, there's actually way more to it than that. 

A quick glance at obvious body parts gives some useful and interesting information.  But much of sexual anatomy and its evaluation is not obvious and not clear cut, and here are some ways this is true. Sexual characteristics are complicated when they are:
    --ambiguous but hidden (such as chromosomes or internal structure);
    --delayed (for instance, ambiguous characteristics that only show at puberty);
    --incremental (generational changes such as decreasing sperm count and changing genital measurements and other indicators of "maleness");
    --cultural (hair length, "voluptuous" vs "fat", etc.);
    --only indirectly related to sex (such as musculature and body shape, "man-boobs", mastectomy and other surgical modifications). 

So if all sex-related anatomical elements are considered, the result is more than a mere binary male/female assignment:  it has to be a scale, and people are spread out all over it.  If we want to be completely honest and accurate, categorizing someone as simply male or female is just an over simplified starting point.   "Amount of maleness" and "amount of femaleness", measured in many different ways, varies greatly between people.

And finally, it's unimportant.

First, this scale isn't useful in considering basic sexual orientation.  Simply being male or female doesn't decide which sex you're attracted to.  Statistically, there's a correlation and most people prefer the opposite sex;  but that's about as interesting and useful as saying that most people have dark skin.  Neither statement is predictive ("Expecting a baby in your family? It will probably be heterosexual and have dark skin"), nor normative ("You're not normal if you're queer or white"), nor evaluative ("The best people are straight and black").

(In fact, this scale isn't useful for much else, either, since the same argument can be made for other traits which may be statistically related to maleness or femaleness, such as compassion, aggression, physical prowess, mechanical skill, or mothering.)


Second, attributing unwarranted meaning to this scale is often harmful.

To expand the truism, "what you think of me is none of my business":  how you are attracted or repelled by my body is your business, not mine. 

The specifics of someone's physical attraction to any other particular body are subjective, and the components are unpredictable and way beyond measurement.  Even though I can describe myself by numbers on scales  ("8 opposite, -1 same, 2 yang, 8 integrity"), I can't pretend that your attractiveness to me indicates anything about your "degree of femaleness".  (At most, any correlation shows that I am well conditioned by my culture.)  And of course, physical attraction is only one component of relationship, and not the most important one.  There's no possible measurement number about you that determines how much I like you. 

But that's how this scale gets used.  Our culture claims (everywhere!) that the more masculine (according the culture's rules) a man is, the more women will love him, and the more feminine a woman is, the more men will love her.  In other words, culture claims that my fifth-scale value determines others' feelings toward me;  and conversely, that their behavior is the test and proof of my success in properly controlling and modifying my body.  This is our culture's problem with body image.


Third, we tend to confuse this fifth "anatomy" scale with the "presentation" scale.  We think being "male" or "female" automatically decides how we have to present ourselves in the world.  But of course, each person has a tremendous range of options available within the presentation yin / yang scale:  how to dress, how to walk, how to talk, what hobbies to have, how to behave toward other people, and much more -- and those choices are independent from (and far richer than) simply how male or female their physical characteristics are.


To summarize, the seemingly simple condition of being a male or a female isn't simple at all;  every person is somewhere on a scale between very strongly male and very strongly female.  But a person's position on this "fifth scale" -- the degree of maleness or femaleness of one's body -- doesn't determine how they are attracted to any other particular person, nor how any other particular person is attracted to them, nor the gender traits of how they show themselves in the world.  In fact, all the significant factors of sexual orientation are independent of this fifth scale;  and confusing this scale with the others, or believing that this scale determines the others, is misleading and limiting.