Straight Life with Rainbow Flag

Although two days ago my mate had completely cleared our driveway of the fourteen inches of fresh powder, yesterday at dawn the snowplow came and barricaded us in. By that point, my husband had come down with a bad cold, so it was up to me to spend an hour with one of our heavy metal gardening shovels, breaking the icy barricade into movable chunks and chucking those chunks into what will be, in six months time, a wild profusion of black-eyed susans blooming under our rainbow flag.

As I toiled away, I could not help but notice that none of my neighbors had been plowed in. And so I could not help but wonder, as I often do at such moments, was it because of our rainbow flag? Did the driver of that truck see our rainbow flag, assume we are gay, and punish us accordingly?

The Social Construction of Sex and Me

I keep running into smart people who seem to think I believe that sex “isn’t real” because it is all “socially constructed.” Allow me to correct this erroneous social construction of me by summarizing here what I think about sex and gender. I’m tempted to say “what I know about sex and gender” because there are few things I feel as sure about as this.

Testes are real. Ovaries are equally real. They sometimes make real gametes. (I don’t mean to imply they sometimes make fantasy gametes—just that they sometimes don’t make gametes.) Chromosomes and genes are also real. As anyone who’s every forgotten to wear a pad on the right day knows, menstrual blood is real. To the delight of this straight woman, penile erections are real. So are clitoral erections. I’m equally delighted about those.

When I say these are “real,” what I mean is that these things have a material existence independent of our ability as humans to notice, study, deny, politicize, or categorize them. I can’t believe I even have to assert this claim, but some academics have gone over the deep end and disagree. (I don’t hang out with such people unless there I have some form of pain killer at the ready.)

So why would I write a book with the phrase medical invention of sex in the title?

What to Wear?

Before Powerpoint became ubiquitously doable, I traveled with slides. (You remember 35 mm slides?) And I had a little ritual that centered on slides: The night before I had to leave on a speaking trip, I would drive my mate crazy by rushing all around the house demanding, “Have you seen my slides? Where are my slides?!”

Once I moved all my slides to my computer and started doing it all in Powerpoint, I couldn’t do that ritual, so I developed another to drive my mate crazy. Now the night before I leave on a speaking trip, I rush around the house pleading, “What should I wear? Help me figure out what to wear!”

It’s actually a serious problem for me, and not because I’m indecisive about clothes...although I am indecisive about clothes.