You keep talking as though people have choices in their sexuality, or who they are attracted to when mostly that isn't the case at all. Attraction isn't a response to a bunch of items on a list - it's a chemical, visceral response to an individual. Granted now that homosexuality and bi/pansexuality are more accepted, we see more of it in evidence, but most people are geared towards the opposite sex to some extent - because that makes sense from a procreative standpoint. My husband and I are a lot alike, and that's part of what I find attractive about him - we're kindred spirits. But there are also all sort of other subconscious and chemical things that are going on in that attraction as well.
And part of how I know that is that I (and most women) are attracted to all sorts of men. I like men with big arms and shoulders, but I also like skinny guys who wear eyeliner and are kind of androgynous. I don't know if guys are more likely to have "a type" but most women find all sorts of men attractive - which makes evolutionary sense because genetic diversity is a key evolutionary trait. If women only wanted a few particular traits in a man, and a certain look, most men would be eerily similar by now because the rest would have died out.
How do you let someone figure out who they are? You put a kid in a room full of toys that aren't coded in some way for their gender and ask them what looks fun to play with - and extrapolate that out to everything else in life. You don't pick who you are - it's already largely innate and the rest is either expressing that or learning to suppress it in order to "fit in" better. And, if who you innately are largely fits with what is coded for your gender, then you probably do OK, but when it's not, and you get bullied for that, it's a problem.
This is to say nothing of all of the horribly destructive things that are part and parcel of our current gender boxes. I've spent probably the past 12 or 13 years actively deconstructing all of the bullshit that I was taught about what it means to be a woman and instead figuring out what it means to be me. This particular issue below wasn't one of the ones I dealt with, but lots of women do so it's a good example of what I mean:
"I was taught that a good girl does not want sex. A good girl should never speak about sex. A good girl should never talk about what she wants.
There is literally nothing that felt more shameful to me than telling my partner exactly what I wanted him to do. And this is not the result of my failure or any lack of responsibility on my part. This is the result of being a woman in a patriarchal culture that shames and suppresses female sexuality.
Not every woman experiences the same level of shaming, but this is a foundational part of our cultural dynamic. You can either be a virgin or a whore — you can’t be both. And if you choose whore, you might have fun in the bedroom, but you will pay for that in every other area of your life.
So I chose virgin. And that left me feeling that I couldn’t speak plainly to my partner about my sexual needs."
And boys are taught that they have to always be in control and can't display any vulnerable emotions and so they are literally dying of loneliness and depression because it's not "manly" to depend or rely on anyone else -despite the fact that we are literally hardwired as human beings to need just that.
If you need someone to show you how to be, then you aren't being you, you are being some version of somebody else. I'm a professional life coach, and I have to report that the vast majority of what I do with clients is to help them parse out what is actually them from the expectations of parents, of religion, of culture, etc. because then they can live a life that is meaningful and fulfilling to them - and not have to keep making choices based on what somebody else wants. Authenticity is such a huge gift and people are so relieved when they can begin living as themselves instead of from the voice in their head that comes from somewhere else requiring them to be something other than they are. That's when making choices gets a whole lot easier because most people do know what they want - they just don't think they can have it - often due to societal or parental pressures, so then they are trying to determine which second best thing they can stomach, and that's why they can't make up their mind.
We've only had good reproductive technology for 30 or 40 years, so it's not exactly surprising that it's still biologically relevant for most people to still primarily be sexually attracted to someone with different "plumbing." Even though monogamy has been overwhelmingly the only acceptable way of mating for the past 5k years in the vast majority of cultures, the head of the human penis is still shaped the way it is in order to scoop out the semen left there by other men.
"The coronal ridge on the human penis is designed to scoop out semen left there from other genetic competitors. It wouldn’t be necessary if that competition had already taken place prior to coitus. And because you don’t want to accidentally scoop out your own semen, it’s typical for men to become flaccid after ejaculation and to need that refractory period before they can go again.
For the human female cervix, like that of a promiscuous macaque who may breed with ten males or more in rapid succession, actually serves not so much to block sperm, as was previously believed, as to busily filter and assess it, ideally several different types of it from several different males, simultaneously. It evolved not as a simple barrier but to sort the weak and bad and incompatible sperm from the good, suggesting by its very presence that there was a need to do such a thing — i.e., that females were mating multiply."
So, if we're mostly no longer multi-maters then why do our sexual organs still look and function the way they did before monogamy became central? I don't know. Because sometimes evolution is quick and sometimes it's slow? Maybe. But what I do know is that attraction is not a response to items on a list, and it's not always a response to someone who is very different from you or "compliments" you in some way. It's entirely out of touch with observable reality to purport that it is. I know how to do nearly all of the same things that my husband knows how to do and vice versa. What does he offer me? Hard to quantify in that sort of nuts and bolts way because that's not how attraction or love actually work.
