Intersex and Oral Sex

      To be honest I didn't know what to expect from this book given the risque cover. However I was pleasantly surprised to find in the first chapter a well-thought out scientific and anthropological perspective on sex, gender and a manner of other important topics that are especially well related to society today (I don't know why I expected any differently...I judged a book by it's cover...sorry). Regardless, I found this chapter extremely interesting and I thought it played well on what we've recently been discussing in class as well as bringing me back to some of the literature I read for my Anthropology class last semester.
      In class I remember Professor Simonson saying that it's strange how with all the categories that there are to describe humans, sex is the most important. So much focus is put on whether and individual is male OR female (and I say "or" because of the stigma that humans can only be one or the other), or what sexuality an individual identifies with. Gender is what people notice first about someone and if their gender is ambiguous to us, it can cause us to have different feelings about that individual. We are always more comfortable knowing a person's gender first and then progressing on to the other so called lesser categories. I felt like this really related to the first few pages of "Dueling Dualisms" as in the Olympic example Maria Patino's sex was the primary concern. This is the same for scientists everywhere too given that so many focus on differences between the sexes, portions of the body that only apply to one sex, and how we can further distinguish and define the sexes. Given all of this, I then understood why there is such stigma, confusion and almost hatred towards intersex individuals. This quote from Fausto-Sterling really stuck with me, "Since intersexuals quite literally embody both sexes, they weaken the claims about sexual difference.". All the people who work so hard to separate the sexes into only two defined boxes, intersex people really mess up their argument.
      Something else this reading made me think of was an ethnography I read last semester for Anthropology called The Gebusi. The author, Bruce Knauft, lived with a tribe in Papua New Guinuea and studied their culture through immersion. He visited them for up to two years at a time, and the section that was brought to mind was the initiation rights of men within the tribe. The first time Knauft visited there were complex relations between initiated men and boys about to be initiated. In order to be more manly, boys becoming men would give oral sex to the defined men. Swallowing their sperm was thought to make for more manly men as the boys would "build up" more and more sperm over time before their initiation. None of the male individuals, initiated or not, classified themselves as gay. They all hoped to have a wife and have children and no one thought that because of the oral sex, these men were gay. When Knauft returned ten or so years later, the Gebusi tribe had had more contact with the outside world and were much more westernized. The men no longer performed this ritual before their initiation. When Knauft asked about the ritual, the men thought he was insane. They couldn't believe their elders had done such things. I thought this really relates to the nurture aspect of gender and sexuality. Depending on the culture that is most imposed upon societies, different there are different interpretations of sexuality.