So, rather than deny the existence of non-male/female attraction we have to examine for a deeper understanding the very nature of attraction itself. Is the sex of the person to whom you are attracted important or even relevant? "Sexuality [is not] learned in the same contexts, it is not practiced for the same purposes, it is not maintained by the same social forces, and it does not cease to be practiced at the same moments in the life course for the same reasons. The social construction of sexuality (and even if sexuality exists as a separable domain in a culture) and its connections to nonsexual conduct are specific to the cultural and historical circumstances of a particular social order," (Kauth 223).
We, then, cannot accurately predict our own sexual behavior as it is absolutely mixed together with a truly infinite number of variables.
For the hermaphrodite, sexual attraction can sometimes be very clear-cut while sexual identity is very confused, while at others the opposite is true. One of the most interesting features of human sexual behavior is the phenomenon of sudden, powerful, and seemingly inexplicable attraction to particular people, while no definition of sexual attraction actually requires opposite-gonadal-sex in the definition of attraction. "The linkage between physical convenience and heterosexuality is relatively light and may be easily upset by environmental or psychological factors," (Ellis 119). Hermaphrodites, like the rest of the world, often find themselves attracted to members of either sex for the same physical, mental, intellectual and spiritual reasons that anyone else is attracted to someone. The designated gender of the target person is not as important overall to the situation as is reciprocity - which, again, is true for anyone's feelings of being attracted to another person. but, attraction is not just based on these amorphous things that combine in some manner, attraction is often a learned behavior based upon the history of the individual and what it is that they respond to in others.
For intersex individuals, sexual identity and attraction hinges upon self-perception. "Most of us take for granted a harmony between our biological sex and our psychological experience of being female or male, our gender identity. We just are women and men, and the relative effortlessness of this identity can lead us to reify a simple, dichotomous view of gender. People are meant to be either female or male, both physically and psychologically," (Looy and Bouma III 172). From ancient history, we know that hermaphrodites have been both a symbolic and very real element of sexual life. For the Indians, hermaphrodites represent the Primal Force, the perfect blending of man and woman into a single being. In China, Iran, Australia and throughout the Middle East, androgyny is symbolically linked to the duality of the soul, the unification of the genders and a representative of mythic time (Haft-Pomrock). Throughout western cultures, however, the androgynous or the hermaphrodite imagery has been treated as an abomination of nature, thus confirming a freak-like status upon the intersex individual. Thus, when the intersex individual looks to define his/her sexuality, it is often filtered strongly through a cultural lens, perhaps more even than a biological or mental one.
Attraction, then, begins with a sense of the self and a set of triggers to which we respond that provide us with an impulse toward a particular person....
Hermaphrodite is an organism in which a single individual has both male and female gametes. Many plants and some animals are naturally hermaphroditic and can self-fertilize and reproduce themselves from a single organism. (Omoto & Lurquin, 2004, p. 209) While some species actually reproduce asexually, such as single celled organisms and other creatures, this is not the same as being hermaphrodite. There are benefits to the species in some sense
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Even Freud believed that girls have penis envy, which is only fully resolved by marrying a male and having a male child. This desperate longing to have a man as a way of finding one's identity and place in society is parodied and mocked in Pink's video "Stupid Girls." Individuals look to culture, including the media, as a way of defining themselves. A thirteen-year-old girl who is told that it
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