By: ABD1

Did anyone else find Max’s comments describing essentialist ideas about sexual orientation and gender during his and Grace’s conversation weird? Hearing “I heard this theory that what’s genetically encoded in us isn’t attraction to men or attraction to women, it’s same sex attraction” just really struck me. It’s an interesting idea, especially for the time, but as someone who has always been weary of biological determinism even back in 2008 (whether talking about orientation or gender, and I do mean gender, obviously not morphological sex, I assume anyone reading this knows that there is no determinant between genetic or morphological sex and gender/s), it felt especially weird to hear this.

Like does the “genetic encoding” that somehow drives you to be attracted to this or that gendered person know what your gender is? And Max has said that he always knew that he was a man. I know that this experience of lifelong gender dysphoria isn’t universal, but wouldn’t an idea like this imply that someone like Max used to be a woman and his brain/mind knew that he was a woman then and so was attracted to women and now that he has affirmed his gender to the outside world and himself that only now is he a man and now this mechanism leads him to men? I know that in Max’s case he’s not even into Tom yet and has scoffed at the idea of being into guys, but doesn’t the idea sort of run counter to the very understanding of gender and orientation that we as a community need to have in order to exist?

I tried thinking about this for like 20 minutes getting lost in my own thoughts and couldn’t really understand how this would work. I get the theory, and it’s just an idea, a way of exploring the changes that many people find surprising, and we as queer people I think do need to be open to all sorts of positive, affirming ideas and theories on gender and sexuality (while not necessarily adopting them or believing them) but still. This kind of thing seemed counter-intuitive. Obviously gender and orientation, and their intersection, isn’t complicated on a practical level, but it can feel complicated to people experiencing certain intersections, and it can definitely be complicated when trying to understand or create “theories” or schema, and there’s plenty out there, so maybe someone who is more well versed can explain it (I, like Carly, never got my Gender Studies minor).

P.S.- “Family style” = All you can eat! (like, you don’t have to order or ask for more rice, you can just help yourself from the bowl). I was so excited to hear the recap for this episode, the Peggy Peabody moment is one of my top moments from the entire series, and I loved watching the rest of the episode (the late 2000s song playing as Helena jail yard stroll is bangin’), Bette being challenged on her snobbey and elitism and being asked “what are you doing to build equity in the already insanely overheated art market?. I guess besides that it was kind of boring though.