The Eye of the Beholder

I have a friend named Nicole who lives in sunny, fire-swept California. It’s something of a private joke between us that she is the most attractive person god ever created. Half Cuban and half Ashkenazi Jew, it may be more than a joke. I would put her looks ahead of the actress Gal Gadot, mainly because some of her parts are larger—um, her lady parts. Parts that ladies have. You get the idea.

Nicole would kill me if I included a photo of her so you’d agree about how attractive she is (or at least pretend to be upset), so I’m including one of Gal Gadot wearing a suit I’d like to have instead so you get the idea.

We’ve been friends for a long time—long enough that she knows how much I enjoy seeing people stumble over their words when they meet her. When I introduce her to mutual friends, I like to describe her as the “fourth most beautiful woman I know,” just to make them wonder who the other three are.

Nicole is married to Tony. Tony is a third-generation pure Italian. He even has an aquiline Roman nose. Sometimes, when people ask who the three most attractive people are besides Nicole, I answer, “Well, there’s Tony, for one.” He is, without question, the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. I’ve never had a sexual experience with a man, but if you held a gun to my head and said I had to, I’d probably call to see if Tony is available first—mainly because David Bowie is dead.

It upsets some people to consider it, but everyone who has ever studied it says that sexuality is a scale, and nobody is entirely on one end of the scale or the other. Everybody God ever created is somewhere in the middle. That doesn’t mean that everybody has a wide range of sexual experiences, but it does mean that what goes on in your head that you’d never act on counts when tallying your sexuality.

For a long time, people believed that homosexuality came from straight boys being “groomed” by gay men. That has been studied intently and is incorrect. For one thing, we’ve discovered that the number of boys and girls who priests and other people of authority sexually groomed in the past was many times more than what we believed. Since we’ve been aware of these cases for over forty years, a considerable amount of work has been done to study the victims. One thing they’ve found is that the victims of this childhood abuse are statistically no more likely to be gay or lesbian than anyone else.

Now that the idea that a child can be “groomed” into homosexuality has been discredited, the same forces are now saying that children are being “groomed” into being transgender by the same suspects, liberal teachers and profit-mad doctors. Elon Musk even accused the “woke mind virus” of making one of his children transgender. The child, in an effort to stand up for themselves, revealed what many people suspected, that Elon Musk uses in vitro fertilization to select for male children, and he’s angry that the male child he paid for is now female, thanks to a meme.

When Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of Memes in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene,” he said that ideas and parts of ideas replicate themselves in the human mind like a virus, and people have misunderstood what he said ever since. Between 1982 and 1983, I first read "The Selfish Gene” because a friend on Compuserve recommended it. I’ve spent almost fifty years trying to understand what Dawkins was saying. While I wouldn’t say I have it entirely right, I’m fairly certain Elon Musk has it altogether wrong. For one thing, transgenderism is a pretty complex idea, and memes are, by the definition Dawkins gives, very simple ideas.

If I could talk to him, I’d ask Musk if there was ever a time in his life when an idea, no matter how often it was spoken about or who promoted it, would make him change his gender.

Saying he used in vitro fertilization to make male babies, I’m referring to the process where chemical and mechanical processes are used to separate the male from female sperm, eliminating the female sperm, and then impregnating the mother by mechanical means. It takes a lot of the romance out of it if you ask me. It also eliminates most of your chances of having a daughter to be proud of. Most people in the West consider this an unethical practice. You can make the case that preventing women from ever being born is an ultimate form of misogyny.

It might also be worth mentioning that Musk believes it is evil for an already born person to select their gender; he has no issue in selecting it for them before they’re conceived. He’s actively participating in a gender-reassignment process that his children had no say in.

I keep hearing about how there are all these efforts to protect children. They want to protect children from Drag Queens reading storybooks while dressed like Mother Goose. They want to protect children from librarians who push books like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Fahrenheit 451,” and “Catcher in the Rye” on fourteen-year-olds. They also want you to believe that illegal Mexicans are kidnapping American kids and selling them in human trafficking rings. On the far end of that spectrum, an alarming number of them think that Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks are killing children in pizza restaurants to harvest their adrenal glands so they’ll have eternal youth. Having seen recent photographs of Hanks and Clinton, I have to say, if they’re doing this, it’s not working. Not even a little. Meanwhile, at Maralago, women in their sixties have faces resembling an inflated bouncy house. That’s not working either. Maybe getting older isn’t that terrible. Most of the women I’ve ever been attracted to, I’m still attracted to, even though their hair is white and their shape has changed.

I suspect that people are using children to justify their existing prejudices. I don’t think they have a choice about that. It’s likely an evolutionary trait. Anything that frightens us makes us worry about what they might do to the young of the tribe, even if they’re not doing anything you should actually be afraid of to begin with. Drag Queens are pretty harmless. For one thing, their costumes, wigs, and makeup cover every square inch of skin. You might as well be looking at a doll, which is kind of the point.

I suspect that the creator God made things like sexuality and perceived beauty a scale with infinite variety for a reason. I’m not the sort of person to believe that “the devil” or some other adversary of God is laying traps for our destruction all over the place. The biggest trap that separates us from God is our prejudices and selfish tendencies. God understands that, like a coral reef, humanity functions as a single organism. We can’t seem to grasp that.

We’ll never know how things would go between me and Tony. Nicole would kill me, and it would break my heart to ever betray her. There is love and there is sexuality. I love both Nicole and Anthony, but they are not part of my sexuality. Love can, under the right circumstances, make sexuality much safer and more rewarding than sexuality without love. In my generation, sexuality without love was pretty common. That’s changing now. They say it’s a result of aids and covid, but I gotta think part of it has to be the result of younger people looking at the wreckage of poorly considered sexual experiences in my generation.

Some people say that they “love the sinner, but not the sin.” I suggest maybe just leaving it at “love the sinner.” It’s very difficult for us to understand what sin is, and we tend to describe many things as sin that aren’t in the Bible and disregard things that are called sin in the Bible. Shrimp and oysters, po-boy, anybody? We can go to hell together. Depending on who makes it, it might be worth it.