a better metaphor We started this chapter thinking about the ways we metaphorize anatomy, creating meaning from random acts of biology in ways that end up making us feel uncomfortable with our bodies. To help undo all that, I like to use a different metaphor: a garden. It’s a metaphor I use a lot—remember the apple tree from the introduction?—because it offers a judgment-free way of thinking about how the sexual hardware we’re born with (our bodies and brains) and the families and culture we’re born into, interact to give rise to the individual sexual self that emerges in adulthood.
It goes like this: On the day you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich and fertile soil, slightly different from everyone else’s. And right away, your family and your culture start to plant things and tend the garden for you, until you’re old enough to take over its care yourself. They plant language and attitudes and knowledge about love and safety and bodies and sex. And they teach you how to tend your garden, because as you transition through adolescence into adulthood, you’ll take on full responsibility for its care.
And you didn’t choose any of that. You didn’t choose your plot of land, the seeds that were planted, or the way your garden was tended in the early years of your life.
As you reach adolescence, you begin to take care of the garden on your own. And you may find that your family and culture have planted some beautiful, healthy things that are thriving in a well-tended garden. And you may notice some things you want to change. Maybe the strategies you were taught for cultivating the garden are inefficient, so you need to find different ways of taking care of it so that it will thrive (that’s in chapter 3).
Maybe the seeds that were planted were not the kind of thing that will thrive in your particular garden, so you need to find something that’s a better fit for you (that’s in chapters 4 and 5).
Some of us get lucky with our land and what gets planted. We have healthy and thriving gardens from the earliest moments of our awareness.
And some of us get stuck with some pretty toxic crap in our gardens, and we’re left with the task of uprooting all the junk and replacing it with something healthier, something we choose for ourselves.
Your physical body—including your genitals—is one part of the basic hardware of your sexuality, the plot of land. Your brain and your