The binary is so tempting. Black. White. Us. Them. Boy. Girl. Big. Small. Loud. Quiet. Good. Bad. Positive. Negative. More than just an efficient way to organize the world, the binary is perhaps a vital tool in maintaining consciousness.
In his book In the Blink of An Eye, Zoologist Andrew Parker explores The Cambrian explosion. This ten-million-year period hosted the dramatic and rapid evolution of almost all present-day animal families. It marks the transformation from simple life forms to complex organisms. It’s often likened to the biological big bang.
But why this ten million-year span out of the billions of years that life has been evolving? Parker concludes that it was due to the development of the biological light sensors we now know as eyes. But we’re talking about minuscule sea slug-looking guys—the sperm in the primordial stew.
For the first time, a living thing could see what was right in front of it. The first thing this simple sea slug would have done with his new light sensors would be to start deciding whether the inputs it was getting were “good” or “bad.” I mean, maybe it floated around for half a million years just in a blissed-out state, letting the sun shine into its little sea slug soul.
Good or bad? I imagine this primordial decision was one of the first binaries in the development of consciousness. Now, 525 million years later, this rudimentary binary has grown into a complex system of binaries—our cultures and our cliques. Including our species’ weighty obsession with good versus evil.
Our brains even look like sea lugs.
The establishment view of gender and sex is perhaps the most famous binary of all. Men are male. Women are female. And this makes sense if our evolutionary goal is to pro-create. It helps to know what parts can go where.
But then, staring out from my chest like two eyes, my nipples seem to imply that we have got it all wrong. I should not have nipples because nipples are for breastfeeding. So, why aren’t cis-men getting gender-affirming care and having their nipples removed?
What Le Fuck?
“You don’t speak language, language speaks you.” - Roland Barthes
I remember asking my French teacher why some words were masculine and some were feminine, even if they didn’t seem to correlate to gender in any way. She told me the terms “masculine” and “feminine” could have just as well been “positive” and “negative.” The gender of the word was just an organizing principle not considered to have much if any correlation to the object or concept that word describes. It turns out she was kinda wrong though. If French evolved in 1993, masculine words would be for monster trucks, baseball bats, blue things, guns, and money. Feminine words would be tutus, cupcakes, pink things, and diamonds. If French evolved in 2023, it’s more likely we probably wouldn’t call them masculine or feminine because we are binary-phobic these days. We’d call them something more politically satisfying.
What’s happening is we’ve experienced a shifting and hardening of our binaries. Much like the source code of this article and website, Human Culture is a complex system of binaries, 1s and 0s.
To illustrate, let’s imagine the potent scenario of one man penetrating another man in some Roman alleyway in 500 BC. In Ancient Rome, their binary wasn’t about sexual preference—gay or straight—it was about social class. If someone came upon two men fucking, they wouldn’t think, “Oh, two gay guys.” They’d instead be determining the legality of the act based on whether or not the dominant person was from the upper ranks of society. An upper-rank man could penetrate almost any man (or woman) he wanted for sexual gratification or pure domination, as long as the receiver was from s lower rung of society. It would be illegal if the roles were swapped and the lower-rung man was on top.
The binaries have shifted into something new because today, if someone powerful in society was penetrating someone powerless in society, they would—at least in theory and some instances—be punished in multiple realms. But in Rome, they’d be praised openly:
“Freeborn Roman men were permitted, and even expected, to be interested in sex with partners of both genders. Even once married, a Roman man might continue to maintain relationships with partners other than his spouse. However, it was understood that he was only to have sex with prostitutes or enslaved people.”1
As a language, French evolved via proto-Germans mispronouncing Latin, which also had feminine and masculine words. But we can barely imagine what their gender norms must have been when they decided what words were feminine and masculine. And now, millennia later, it’s become arbitrary what new words are assigned feminine or masculine.
Like a fractal, our binaries build something complex that births a new spectrum that gets phase-shifted and subdivided amongst all the other binaries into a complex but familiar seeming system. We call this system culture, and it’s made of words, and our words contain our entire history.
But these words only signify the existence of something else; they are not a thing. They are an outstretched hand pointing at something in the distance. Our words are disembodied, like our reflection in the mirror. You see your body in the mirror, and instead of loving it for being your vessel on this Earth, you judge it like it’s not you, like it’s some advertisement on the subway or a picture someone hands you. But that’s just an image of you, and while the beauty industry and empiricist West would like you to think that’s all there is to the story, we know that a mysterious, indefatigable cosmic energy is also present within your body’s complex systems and veinous tributaries. And this energy is nowhere to be seen when you look in the mirror.
The same goes for the words we use to describe gender—they betray the actual magic reality of our sexual bodies.
Radical Forgiveness for All Nippled People
The crux of my wanting to write this article is that no matter what someone might be saying, they have nipples, and that’s funny and cute and engenders compassion (in me, at least). The most anti-trans, gender-normative, establishment-view dude still has two nipples. What do we make of that? Why would God have made us all transgender in such an obvious way?
I came across this picture of Arizona Governor Doug Ducey speaking at a podium to promote a bill to ban gender-affirming care.2 Under the svelt lines of his suit lay his delightful and delicate little nipples. I’m sure, like most people, he’d even feel all warm and fuzzy if someone gently rubbed them.
His blood-red tie hangs tight around his neck and leads sensuously down into the V-shaped crevice of his starched jacket. His face looks groomed, and one could even venture to say he is wearing makeup for the cameras. So we’ve got cis-man with nipples wearing makeup telling us that the gender binary is a universal reality.
We have all spent the last few decades watching the gender binary get looser in some circles and stricter and sillier in others. What man could seriously dedicate their work to enforcing the gender binary while their adorable little nipples follow them everywhere? It must be such a sad, disembodied place to exist.
The Purple Nurple
Here comes my warning, and it’s one that’s hidden in most of my writing: anyone can fall victim to propaganda. Propaganda disembodies you. Only when a very enticing story has overtaken you could you dedicate energy to something irrelevant and even contradictory to your existence.
Propaganda, which is a mix between magic and language, takes advantage of the fact that you don’t want to waste your energy on understanding things if they have already been understood by someone else. Counterintuitively, in letting this predigested understanding pass our internal censors, like a cancer, propaganda makes us waste our energy on things that aren’t relevant to us. We stick with the tribe because it feels like the smarter call, a better energy use. And before we know it, we’re voting for politicians who campaign against our interests, we’re supporting corrupt systems and organizations, and we can’t find a way out because everyone is taking part in their way.
I have no grand conclusion here except to remember two things:
(1) God is not efficient. If it’s too good to be true, it’s probably not true. The binary—any binary— is too good to be true. That’s why the acronym LGBTQIA+ is so messy, because it’s the arc of history bending toward justice, and it will not be neat and pretty— it will be unwieldy and uncomfortable. If someone hands you a book or sends you a political party’s website and says: This has all the answers you need. You can be sure it’s propaganda. Stop letting other people do your thinking for you, even if (and especially if) you trust them.
(2) Whether or not you use them to breastfeed, if you’re a cis-man and you have nipples, they are female body parts you were born with, they are beautiful, and you are kind of trans for having them.
Have a good week.
As always, I finish with a picture of my kid and a picture of my breakfast:
https://www.thoughtco.com/homosexuality-in-ancient-rome-4585065
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/30/politics/arizona-transgender-health-care-ban-sports-ban/index.html
Nice Nipples, Bro