How Many Is Too Many?
When I was going through puberty my best friend was Lucy who lived across the road. I have three sisters and no brothers, or at least no brother that I have ever met. We had a rota on our kitchen wall, next to "On the Children" by Kahlil Gibran, and household chores were split equally between us children. I'm not suggesting my mother did nothing, more making the point that I was brought up in an environment where people were, first and foremost, equal. People with their own identity, their own characteristics, gender being just one facet of these.The world at large however seems intent on finding insignificant and unimportant differences between the sexes. Indeed a lot of money seems to be spent on studies. I find it baffling that a scientist should choose to conduct research that shows that heterosexual men have more sexual partners than heterosexual women rather than do something useful with their life. Particularly when you consider that every time a heterosexual man has heterosexual sex with a heterosexual woman a heterosexual woman has heterosexual sex with a heterosexual man. So maths and logic have already given us the answer. Line up some pink headed matchsticks on one side and some blue headed matchsticks on the other. Now try forming sexual relationship lines with cotton between the two sides and see how you get on working out the mean. It doesn't matter if you decide the pink ones are male and the blue ones female it won't affect the results. An adaptation of this experiment is relevant to fidelity. By the way according to an American study the ideal number of sexual partners is ten. My reaction was: "What, at the same time?"
Of course the crucial truth such studies reveal is not any useful facts but rather an indication of how deep rooted gender stereotypes are in our society. How despite the fact that many women enjoy football, I have no interest in it whatsoever, they will still collectively play down the number of sexual partners they have had whereas a man will likely exaggerate.
The following collection highlights what I consider to the more interesting ways our relationship with gender manifests itself. On occasions just amusingly stupid, at others with the barbaric mutilation of genitals.