Heternormative Assumptions are Broken

Lawrence of Arabia said he had sex with men because there were few "public" women available -- in other words prostitutes -- and they weren't clean and healthy, making fit, young men a vastly more attractive option.

Gender segregated prison facilities, presumably designed to prevent sexual relationships and sexual assault, don't prevent either sexual relationships nor sexual assault. The situation results in same-sex relationships and same-sex sexual assault. 

At best, it prevents pregnancy. It doesn't prevent sexual acts, trauma nor the spread of STDs.

For business or careers, it's even worse. It took me a lot of years to come up with my (rules of) First Contact hypothesis in part because I have multiple "chatty culture" influences and in part because I have a long, long history of many longstanding "intimate" personal  relationships (as in we know each other well, not specifically sexually).

My dad was twelve years older than my mom and he retired from his military career and bought a house in Columbus, Georgia the summer I turned three. He had shrapnel in his eye from Vietnam and blind spells as a consequence which contributed to him failing to establish a second career after he retired from the Army.

So my father was sometimes unemployed for months at time or working no more than 40 hours a week. He was around a LOT when I was a child and my mother was officially a full-time homemaker until I was twelve. 

The house they bought was brand new construction in an unfinished brand spanking new suburb. One of my first memories is viewing this house with a real estate agent and it had papered walking paths because the yard was basically mud. They hadn't yet put in the landscaping, so they put down paper to protect the floors.

This was the 1960s and many of our immediate neighbors bought their house around the same time we did and stayed until after I got married and moved away from Columbus. 

I had friends who lived one or two streets over or whatever for many years and I graduated high school with some of the same people from my kindergarten class. In my teens, I couldn't go anywhere without running into people I knew.

These weren't people I counted as part of my inner circle or people I knew well. But if you casually interact with the same people for years and years, you learn stuff about them without trying. 

The Avon lady was some flavor of Asian and she had super long hair and dressed like an Asian immigrant in clothes from a different culture before she decided to work as the Avon lady. She cut her hair and began dressing like an American to sell Avon products. 

I didn't know that from talking to her and asking questions. I knew that because her son went to school with me and in elementary school she showed up once with her black hair down to her knees and dressed like someone from something like Thailand. I didn't feel she was Japanese or Chinese. 

I don't know where she was from. I never asked. She didn't really look ethnically Asian to me and had I not seen her with crazy long hair and likely wearing her native garb from her homeland, I probably would have thought one of her parents was a non-White immigrant because I just thought of her two kids as White and never could quite reconcile how I perceived them with what I knew of their mother. 

So I got married at 19 to another 19 year old who went to my high school, who was part of my gaming group and whose father had been career Army like mine had been. I married someone with enormous shared social and cultural context.

There's a lot I didn't need to ask him because I knew where he lived and what military life is all about. His paternal grandfather was also an Army retiree and so his father grew up in Columbus and he had been visiting Columbus and hearing stories about Columbus long before his parents bought a house there. 

He had stories from his grandfather about significant local events. 

During the big snow storm when I was like eight, I built my first and only snowman. His grandfather, who had a tour of duty in Germany, pulled out his snow shovel and began shoveling his roof. The neighbors pointed and laughed until the news on the radio began reporting collapsed roofs and then they asked to borrow it.

That was eight years before I met the future ex. I didn't know his family at that time, yet there was a kind of shared history and when he told me that story, I knew from firsthand experience he wasn't just making up tall tales.

My mother was a German immigrant that my father met and married while stationed in Germany. My father served in both World War II and Vietnam. My ex-husband's grandfather served in World War II and his father served in Vietnam and they both were stationed in Germany for a time. 

I didn't need lengthy explanations about "What's a snow shovel? And why were roofs collapsing? And how did he know he should shovel his?"

When I make casual conversation with people and ask what I feel are completely innocent questions to establish adequate context to understand what they are saying, people routinely misinterpret this as intimate bonding.

If I knew you from age 5 to age 18 and was repeatedly in the same class with you during those thirteen years, I didn't need to grill you for details. I just knew stuff because I was there when it happened or knew you at the time it happened and heard you tell someone else how you broke your arm or whatever. 

This didn't mean we were best friends or sleeping together or anything of the sort.

Metaphorically I guess it's sort of like living at the beach in Hawaii and then moving to Minnesota and walking around in my bikini because that's normal behavior to me and everyone reacts like I'm NAKED and no one dresses like that in public and I must be inviting sexual overtures and I'm like "What are you WEIRDOS talking about???? Get away from me with your offensive behavior! I'm buying GROCERIES here. Don't you perverts just GO SHOPPING for essentials? What the hell???"

During my divorce I intentionally scrubbed my casual conversation of all personal details about my future ex because if I mentioned his hair color, men with that hair color would act like "I'm in like Flynn!" and men with other hair colors would act like kicked puppies, as if I had just buttonholed them, called them by name and said "Fuck you in particular. I will NEVER date you!"

Like I'm sorry so many people seem to have never in their lives known a single person well yet managed to reproduce, but me mentioning the hair color of my future ex is not some confession of deep dark secrets about sexual preferences and predilections and frankly you thinking that makes me wonder if you're something like a necrophiliac because why in the hell would you have SEX with anyone because of HAIR COLOR???????

Again: What in the absolute HELL, man????? Hair color is not secret information in the US. Most Americans don't wear hijabs in public. 

You know WHY we have idiotic rules about assuming EVERYONE is obviously straight which gives rise to stupid assumptions about what they meant by that? Because you people are amazingly shallow and....

You people are all HOs. I don't have another explanation for how 99.999999 percent of humanity can read significant sexual information into the mention of my husband's hair color.

Because I just don't HAVE SEX with some guy I met five minutes ago because he has the right hair color and bought me a drink. Like EWWWW!!!!!! NO.

If you aren't literally a sex worker,  WHY would ANY woman wanna do that???? 

This completely psychotic, wrong, stupid broken social standard is the basis of all of heternormative society so you brain-damaged, sexually uptight weirdos can assume you know significant private information about people you met 30 nanoseconds ago.

You think you know that based on imagining you know what junk is in their pants and then from covered up private bits you've never seen while you imagine you know if it's a penis or a vagina, you know 95 percent of what you need to know about their sexuality to successfully navigate an extremely long list of highly nuanced and complex social things. 

I've spent years thinking something like "If you need to ask if I'm available, you have no business asking because you don't know me well enough to reasonably ask for a date and there's no other justifiable reason to pry into my private life."

I don't have any clue how we fix this because I've found myself pressured into conforming to this bizarre social standard that I need to fear casually mentioning my ex's hair color lest men wildly misinterpret that through a sexual lens. It's not safe for me to try to set the standard that "Hey, stupid. That's casual conversation and not some deeply intimate, private interaction. Duh."

Whether I'm gay or straight or some other flavor of queer really shouldn't concern you if you and I aren't both hoping to get jiggy. If you hit on me and I say "No," it's not really pertinent whether it's because "I only do blonds" or "I don't swing that way" or "I'm involved with someone" or any of ten thousand other reasons. 

And knock-on effects of this incredibly broken bizarre insane social standard include significant barriers to female career success because you people leap to assumptions this is a SEXUAL relationship for incredibly stupid reasons that wouldn't make you think that if it was a guy.

And then if it is a gay guy, you may find yourself accidentally on a gay date, which is fine if you make your living as a comedian looking for material for your stand-up routine but AWKWARD as all hell if you imagined you were professionally networking.