…BECAUSE KNOWING THE END IS THE SUREFIRE WAY TO MOVE FORWARD RIGHT.

I AM feeling sexy.

I’m reading up the psychology behind human intelligence, that is, by definition, the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations. I just have some musings on a particular subject matter: Sexual expression.

According to results from personality tests, I score high in showing behaviors that allow a lot of room for creativity and, to a lot of degree, sexual expression.

I grew up with a very nurturing mother who shaped me in the traditional way Asian parents shape their daughters in order to be “marriagable” – that is, to be ultra feminine. Soft-spoken, multi-talented, light and gentle, and all the other feminine traits you can think of.

However, I am raised with two older brothers, who taught me a lot of things, boyish things. Me and my brothers have very intimate relationships. We love to engage in novelty-seeking experiences – we talk nonsense, often we talk just to make noise, but we also love to talk about big ideas. Huge ideas. Absurd ideas. So, anyway, we’re really close. But, something to note here: They’re not even close to those overprotective brothers who set rules and regulations for treating their baby sister for all the men they meet. My brothers are so flexible that for most of my life I wonder how they think of me and the idea of losing me to another man (as in, whenever I’m in relationships).

I’m aware that they’ve taught me a lot of masculine traits as I grow up, and that has become my own protective shell to safeguard the fragile, feminine traits inside my self. Since it’s a long, developmental process, adopting androgyny and all, these masculine traits have endured enough to become a permanent part of me. As I’m coming of age into adulthood, my hormones and I are going up and down like roller coasters, and there are some thought-provoking questions I tend to ask myself concerning how masculine or how feminine I should act, especially in recent years (I’m presently 21 years old).

I think that was part of the many psychological (and consequently physiological) reasons why I’ve stopped menstruating for such a long period of time.

We all know that the human hormones and the rhythms go up and down in our body, and they not only shape our body – they also deliberately construct our temperaments. Our patterns of thinking shapes the pattern of how our genes adapt to new experiences and situations. Hormones really determine a lot about how we operate our life on a day-to-day basis. In my case, I’m highly functional when I run by dopamine and oestrogen, plus oxytocin, whenever I’m out for a run. So I satisfy my personal (to be specific: biological) needs, as driven by these hormones, through physical exercise and dance movements.

Since biologically I am female, naturally, I express a lot of feminine traits. It’s an inherent thing. There’s no need to consciously learn these aspects of my feminine psyche. On the other hand, I’ve been struggling with a stable self-concept that I can always uphold in all kinds of situations, across all contexts, so that I don’t have to act in a certain way and act another way in another situation. It’s tiresome to juggle multiple identities. Ironically, isn’t that the way our modern lives has conditioned this identity-shifting pattern of thinking as a daily necessity?

Of course, there are defense mechanisms we can always use to cope with the instability of our sense of self – but it takes a lot of time to develop that mature attitude, to transmute a particular emotion to a positive perception beneficial for both our ego and for others. For win-win situations. Takes a lot of trials and errors. Any entrepreneur would agree with that statement when starting out a business.

However, I’m willing to keep on learning how to take advantage of my androgyny, channel them in functional ways that work best for me.

It’s still difficult for me to act the way I would really act when some guy on the street whistled just because I have long hair, or to accept that a guy is attracted to me because of the outer appearance I naturally express, which is the most natural thing in the world for us to do as we are – animalistic human beings (who are also intelligent).

In the past year, I’ve really learned a bad behavior. To counter that whistle, I adopted these really unfeminine, aggressive, and self-destructive behaviors that actually kills my femininity. Because that little whistle, or that look, or that touch a stranger makes you feel – you instantly feel vulnerable. As a result, I don’t feel good at all whenever I am consciously or unconsciously expressing my sexuality and having the opposite sex ogling like a hungry animal (unless it’s someone I’m also attracted to. I mean, all this is just in the language of scientific literature. I’m won’t normally talk to people like this).

So I’ve come to transmute that behavior and direct that to a different focus – Human nature is amazing.

Which is why I always turn to science whenever these basic, self-destructive behaviors start to overwhelm me. Science tells us the similarities between both genders, across all races and cultures, societies all around the world.

With science, I’m glad that I can always remember how we can always take control of our thoughts, remember that we’re Homo sapiens, that is, intelligent animals, who can think in our own creative ways and adapt to all sorts of situations.

And just by directing those thoughts to this new, optimistic direction in mind, I’m already solving a personal problem.

So, yeah.

At the end of last year, I finally chopped off my hair, mainly because of those feelings. I feel insecure about the very basic fact that men are attracted to visually-stimulating women and their most obvious beauty feature: Long mane. I am blessed to have naturally thick dark hair, which is slightly brown by nature. I was single. I was alone. I felt that I only have myself to rely on, and I can’t be this fragile. And so I cut my hair so I can act like a boy.

Now, though, I learn that I can manipulate how I behave. Last week, I’ve bought my clip-on fake hair that I can set myself up with before I get out of the door and seize the day, feel my best – feel my most confident. Before I clip that thing on, I ask myself: Do I want to be mainly a female throughout my day, or a man?

What matters is a win-win situation for all.

In conclusion, I think that a lot of problems within our societies come from personal sufferings like these, little or big, that which we keep struggling to fight within ourselves and therefore foster our larger environments the same behaviors we are struggling within. To make peace outside we must first use our limbic brain to direct our egoistic, animalistic, reptilian brains.

We’re Homo sapiens after all, and to love is to be a human being after all.

 

I saw my gynecologist the other day, and she said I’m fine. I just need to balance my hormones… by coping with stress well, by changing my lifestyle. In a world of power dominance, battle of the sexes, and money-driven society, I’m deciding to taking advantage of my androgyny to rule my world. Females live longer after all; females had the last laugh after all.

On a side note, men and women are not that different. In I suggest reading up on the latest studies on neuroscience. You’ll discover that there are more similarities between the male and female brains than there are differences. Except for the obvious fact that men’s brains are bigger than women. But bigger doesn’t mean better. Although we should always remember that women comes after men, according to the Genesis.

Cheers to human nature and the marvelous, artful, ingenious activity we now call great sex, and the sexuality we manifest in our everyday self-expression.

 

 

SALUNA is signing off.

Saluna and her stories: View all / Diary entries