Ladies, gentleman and everything in-between. I come to you with a revelation that may surprise you. Now, as you may have intuited, I am an ass-kicking, card-carrying, take no prisoners or bullshit feminist through and through. I think men should be nannies and women should be president and anyone who wants to should wear pants or skirts or makeup or play with dolls or legos. Don’t get me started on access to birth control or the enforcement of Title IX unless you have time for a long lecture. And yet, here it is…

I love gender roles, even really specific gender roles, inside of my own relationships.

(Now, a quick rant on definitions: When I say gender – I am talking about the social constructs of men and women, not the biological sexes male and female. These are different, don’t conflate them ever again! I refuse to fill out forms on which the options for gender are male and female or the options for sex are man or woman. You can too!)

Okay, so gender roles – I love them. This is why.

From a very young age I had confusing notions about gender, and there are a few events regarding that I remember vividly. One summer when I was about 5, I was running around the neighborhood with two boys who lived next door. We had all striped down to our shorts and were drawing war paint on each other’s chests with dandelions. Then all of a sudden, the boys’ older sister, probably about 17, came running outside and started yelling at me, just me, to put a shirt on. I was embarrassed and confused: I looked just like the boys, why couldn’t I take my shirt off too? She couldn’t give me reason than just to repeat at me angrily that it was very wrong. I would like to thank this girl for the lifetime of insecurity that followed about my breasts.

As I got older, I reveled in androgyny. Throughout elementary school I would tuck my hair into a baseball cap to see if I could get store clerks or strangers to call me young man, then relish their shock as I whipped off the hat and revealed I was a girl. I shaved my head in high school and again in my mid-20s. In my pre-teen years I tried to figure out a non-messy way to pee standing up. (I have yet to perfect this.) I have bound my breasts with an ace bandage, I love the comfort of clunky men’s shoes, and I have worn a strap-on in public under my jeans. But I have also worn a push up bra, spikey heels, and the occasional little black dress.

I suck at multi-tasking, a skill usually attributed to the inter-hemispheric communication more common in female brains (although the jury might still be out on how sound this science is), yet I am very sensitive and fairly intuitive, and I abhor violence (except in sports). I wear mascara daily; yet often leave the house without brushing my hair. I have fantasized about both being and having a housewife (hypothetically of course, marriage is not my thing). I am awash in contradictions in how I express my gender or at least how people think I should express it, and don’t fit perfectly the stereotypes of either. Yet again, I love those pesky gender roles.

This contradiction plays out very clearly in who I include am attracted to, and whom I include in my dah. In general, the men in my life are typical, masculine men. I date big, muscular guys; soldiers, and engineers, ruggers and hockey players. But when I find myself crushing on a girl she’s usually smaller than me, and more feminine. Although, I do love androgyny in women too. Generally, I find the butch-femme dynamic very appealing, whether with a man or a woman, yet I desire equity and partnership in my relationships.

Enter Jamie, the latest addition to my dah. Jamie and I met online, and initially we talked a few times about the possibility of him joining Charlie and I on our quest for plurality in our sex life. As things have started to fizzle with Charlie (I know! more on this coming up!) Jamie and I decided to meet on our own. We video chatted a few times so we would recognize one another in person, and to ensure the mutual attraction was still there. It was.

Jamie is 6’3”, and has the lean muscular build of a marathon runner. He is aloof and opinionated, and works with really big machines. He and I argued about politics and the economy over coffee, decided we liked each other enough to hook up again in the future, and so three days later he was standing in his skivvies in my living room.

Oh, one thing forgot to mention about Jamie, he likes to wear women’s underwear. In fact, he later told me that on our first date, under his faded Ivy league t-shirt and khaki shorts were a pair of red-lace thong panties. Here it was, the perfect contradiction for me. A masculine man with frilly underpants. Fantastic.

I guess it’s not that I love gender roles, as much as I love challenging them, and playing with them. But this, like all kinks and fetishes and sexual escapades, can get tricky. I have been with men in the past that were into cross-dressing or feminization. However, with them I hated it. Because what they were into was something far more sinister – being humiliated because they were acting like women. This was not a mutual exchange of power, a bending of the traditional expectations of gender, or an opportunity for us to express our own fluidity. It was a partner using my penchant for traditionally masculine-type expression, as dominance, to actually degrade women. For some reason, this was not fun for me.

(By the way, this simultaneous upholding and challenging of gender roles is part of why I loved Dating & Hookup so much…I know I’m biased but seriously guys, have you read this yet? Do it. It’s gonna be a thing.)

So far, it doesn’t seem Jamie is like that. He is not humiliated that he is wearing silky bloomers, he is enjoying it. When we played with gender it was mutual, I wasn’t humiliating him, because being feminine isn’t humiliating. For the record, I don’t like expressing as a man because it is either humiliating or empowering. I do it because when I’m in that mood, it feels right, it feels like how I am supposed to be. From our brief encounter, I got the feeling that was how Jamie felt too. Although that doesn’t mean we didn’t fantasize about him getting caught as the top of his thong poked out of his jeans.

Charlie and I had a similar dynamic. Part of non-dating someone else who is also bisexual – or at least comfortable with gender or sexual fluidity, is that we can experiment with gender, with sexuality, with power, in a way that is mutually respectful and beneficial.

I don’t know if things will continue with Jamie past that first hook up, but what I do know, is that a being with a muscular man in turquoise lace panties, who wants me to be tough and masculine one minute but will make me feel diminutive and sweetly kiss me on the cheek the next, is a pretty great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

So, how do you perceive your own gender, or gender roles?

Image by Nevada Tumbleweed (Mark Holloway).