NYTimes Charles M. Blow
Recently, Miley Cyrus told Elle UK, “I’m very open about it — I’m pansexual.”
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Attraction is simply more nuanced for more people than some of us want to admit, sometimes even to ourselves. That attraction may never manifest as physical intimacy, nor does it have to, but denying that it exists creates a false, naïve and ultimately destructive sense or what is normal and possible.
Furthermore, different people can experience attraction differently. For some, the order of attraction starts with body first. That’s fine. For others though, it starts with the being first, the human being, regardless of the body and its gender. That’s also fine. And yet, the idea that one can have a physiological response to something other than gendered physicality seems to some antithetical to their rigid, superannuated notions of attraction, or even heretical to it.
But it seems more younger people are liberating themselves from this thinking and coming to better understand and appreciate that people must have the freedom to be fluid if indeed they are, and that no one has the right to define or restrict the parameters of another person’s attractions, love or intimacy.
People must be allowed to be themselves, however they define themselves, and they owe the world no explanation of it or excuse for it. They have to be reminded that the only choices they need to make are to choose honesty and safety.
Attraction is attraction, and it doesn’t always wear a label.
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