We all remember where we were when we first heard a snippet of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay, “We should all be feminists,” on Beyoncé’s widely recognised song and music video, “Flawless.” We all remember how quickly obsessed we became with Chimamanda and all her works – especially as little African girls who learnt about the importance, benefits, and necessity of ‘western’ ideals such as feminism and female liberation in our classrooms only to go back home to a patriarchal environment that pushes for and maintains the superiority of masculinity while infantilising femininity.

I remember first learning about pansexuality through the Netflix series, Sex Education, back when it still practised what its namesake preached, but that’s a story (essay) for another day. I remember thinking, Isn’t that just bisexuality, but with extra steps? What’s the difference? Are the two separate categories even needed?

These two experiences came together when an idea popped into my head on how we should all be pansexual. I laughed to myself then, thinking about how the media would react to my obvious plagiarism of the beloved essay, but I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to use it as inspiration. I reread the essay and began brewing my own adapted spin-off version of the think piece. This went on for years, in my head still, as I kept simultaneously mulling over my undecided, confused sexual orientation.

Then news came of Chimamanda’s alleged transphobic remarks, halting any plans of the essay manifesting into the physical realm. Though I didn’t completely abandon the idea, as it continued to consume my mind, I found myself filled with trepidation and hesitated to bring it to fruition in today’s culture of cancelling problematic figures along with anybody associated with them or perceived as allies.

Recently, Chimamanda has been promoting the release of her new book, Dream Count, and the little girl in me who still has the Beyoncé album in rotation, who still perks up in excitement upon hearing the words, “We teach girls that they can be successful, but not too much,” found herself feeling ecstatic at the awaited return of her catalytic introduction to both feminism and aspirations of being a published author one day. I pushed the transphobic remarks to the back of my head and whispered to myself, surely not all of us mean it when we say we don’t separate the art from the artist, right? and had planned to purchase the book anyways (as soon as I received magic money that rains my way from time to time from the unemployment Gods.

That was until I saw a heartbreaking Instagram story by my most supportive friend throughout my writing journey, who identifies as they/them, speaking on how they cannot believe that the people in their life are supporting someone, Chimamanda in this case, who is against them and their very existence. I felt a sense of shame, and all the anticipation for the upcoming book plummeted right from the garden of my stomach where it played with many butterflies, down to the soles of my feet, where beaded, bleak, and black crows awaited their turn to bite at my toes.

This essay came into my mind again, and I decided that I would go ahead and write it. I don’t know what my intentions are with this essay – to preach to the world the wonders of loving someone for their beating organ instead of their bringer of orgasms, or to hopefully catch the attention of my childhood hero and appeal to her previous convictions of who deserves what rights. I do hope that this essay reaches the right people and touches the necessary hearts, for I truly stand by and believe in the notion that everything is indeed love, and only it in its purest, authentic soul can cure and transform society.

***

On the road to figuring out my sexuality, I can’t help but feel restrained and trapped by the very labels that were created to provide liberation, emancipation, and a sense of freedom. While I canonically refer to myself as bisexual, a part of me feels a sense of dissatisfaction with identifying with that sexual orientation.

Bisexuality – a sexual orientation wherein someone finds romantic and sexual attraction towards both the same and opposite sexes; or, put plainly, the male and female sexes. Sounds simple enough, right? But then I got to thinking, in this modern age of dismantling rigid gender classification systems, what would really count as the male and female sex? Does that refer strictly to those who identify as cisgender, as in with their assigned sex and gender at birth, or does it also denote a more contemporary version that includes anybody, such as transgenders, who identify themselves under the male and female genders?

In a perfect reality, the answer would be even simpler; you identify as pansexual – a sexual orientation wherein someone finds themselves attracted to the character, personality, and attributes of a person, and not necessarily what their gender, or more so, genitalia constitute. But doesn’t that make us all pansexuals? Or rather, shouldn’t we all be pansexuals?

Romantic attraction is defined by having feelings of strong affection towards someone, loving somebody for who they are and how they make you feel, and an intense desire to engage in pleasurable acts, to name a few. In no form or manner does it state anything about their genitalia; be it naturally embowed or artificially appended.

We have evolved, and our ideas of gender have evolved. If we are genuinely practising what we as human beings define as love, shouldn’t none of us care about what’s happening with our partners’ privates? Is someone’s sexual organ that imperative to the success of the relationship? Shouldn’t the pleasure, the feeling of an orgasm itself, be the driving force behind sexual and intimate satisfaction, with no dependence on the appendage or device used? Is it not the heterosexuals themselves – a colonially enforced sexual orientation referring to individuals attracted only to the opposite sex – who reiterate the saying, “The size of the tool doesn’t matter; it’s how you use it that does”? Well, does the tool itself even matter? Are heterosexuals not the same sexuality that pushes for the use of artificial devices such as vibrators, anal beads, dildos, cock rings, harnesses, butt plugs, and massagers, etc., because sex toys are supposed to be a non-threatening couples’ bedroom accessory? In fact, many straight relationships constantly express and lament how they find themselves oppressed by the very genitals that they obsess over.

“He couldn’t find the clit.”
“It wouldn’t fit and hurt too much.”
“It’s too hairy.”
“It isn’t tight enough.”
“It doesn’t reach my pleasure spot.”
“It gave me BV.”
“I’ve been married 40 years and have yet to experience an orgasm.”
“It won’t work right and seldom gets hard when needed.”
“It’s small!”
“It’s big!”
“It smells!”

And how were or are all these complaints solved? By freeing ourselves of the rigid, heteronormative, colonial, and religious definition of what an act of sex is (a man’s penis being inserted back and forth into a vagina) and finding other avenues of pleasure. Maybe you and your partner choose to focus on simulating the nipples this time instead of stimulating the clitoral hood. Maybe you and your partner decide to each choose a toy of your liking and participate in an act of mutual masturbation as a way of performing sexual intimacy. Maybe you and your partner decide to reverse gender roles and have the woman wear a strap to insert into the male during missionary as opposed to the regular norm. Regardless of the method, more and more couples are choosing to opt out of solely penetrative sex and are trying out new ways by the day to work around the stubborn, unaccommodating, inflexible, demanding, disagreeable, and difficult to work with genitalia, rendering the body part semi-obsolete to the love-making process and experience.

By that virtue, if you were to take a person’s private parts away from them, can you sit there in all honesty and tell me that you would love them any less? During my many musings on whether or not I identified as bisexual, a thought that kept occurring was what was to happen if my partner decided to transition into another gender. As a bisexual, nothing would change, right? It’s still a gender I am attracted to, either way, so I still win in the end. Then I thought deeper about the matter. Would I love my partner any less if they decided to switch genders and transition? If I fell in love with someone, and they told me that they are transsexual/transgender, would it change my desire and capacity to feel attraction towards them, and delete any romantic feelings that had been brewing or had been cemented? The answer was no. I wouldn’t care. Or rather, I would care, care that they trust me enough to confide in me, and care enough to support them throughout their transitionary journey, whether they decide to physically undertake sex change surgery or if they’d rather just present as the opposite sex in their current bodily state.

The problem with genitalia is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Can you really look at someone whom you’ve chosen to be your spouse and partner for life, and tell them that the removal or addition of some physical body parts will change how you feel about them emotionally? Will you look at your spouse differently, even though they still make your favourite peanut butter soup that made you fall in love in the same manner? Are you willing to divorce your partner who still laughs in that squeaky donkey-like manner that causes your whole family, in-laws included, to join in on the laughter despite the joke not being that funny? Would you truly let go of the same person who slips socks on your feet while you’re still sleeping because they remember how cold they get at night, or who travels all the way to your workplace because you forgot your lucky pen and they remember how you said it keeps you confident during board meetings, or who goes to the post office on your behalf because you don’t like your old Sunday school teacher who works there, or who always remembers your favourite restaurant order and somehow always knows when to order it for you when you’re down, without you ever having to remind them, or the person whom was the other chemical ingredient in your joint scientific collaboration of creating and raising beautiful kids who change your hypothesis daily on what it means to be a human being and love as a human being. Can you really leave? Even though you are still married to the same person, whose changes are reserved only to physical attributes such as their voice, bodily appearance, mannerisms and the abandoning of certain forced gender expectations and roles while still retaining the same emotional, personality, and characteristic attributes?

For a species that swears to base its attraction on qualifications such as a person’s character, a person’s humour, the way they carry themselves and treat others, this shouldn’t be too hard. But then again, it is that very same species that also claims, asserts, swears, and screams “personality over looks,” while spending an awful lot of time setting its dating site preferences to specific filtering limits, with bios such as: “Don’t bother if your weight is above 150kgs,” or “If you’re under 6’5 DNI!” and “I prefer brunettes over blondes.”

But for those of us who mean it – those of us who truly go for the ones whose innate humane character far surpasses anything to do with their outer human presentation – we should all be pansexual. We should think about love differently. What if, in the act of loving one another, we focus on ability instead of genitalia? What if, in a courting phase for a relationship, we focus on interest instead of genitalia? By being pansexual, we could all reinforce the idea and start a movement that proves to the world that it is love for humanity, love for an entire human race; despite their skin, cultural, religious, ethnic, economical, and even genital differences, that will truly heal us all as a nation, and provide acceptance, bringing us closer to Samsaric salvation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash