I've been mulling over the concept of desire's construction for years now. When I look back on my own notions of beauty through the years, I'm struck most by how much more pleases my palate now, and how many more colors I have on my palette to paint a picture of what I desire. In short, with increased experiences, the space required to house my tastes has become quite palatial! (I couldn't resist a bit of wordplay.)
The question of "Where is the line between taste and unjust discrimination?" comes up often when discussing the intersections of sexual attraction, gender, age, and race (amongst other things). To better address what we all seek to gain from the answer—chiefly, to be (reciprocally) desired—I think another way to frame the question is: "How do we personally stand to benefit from examining how we construct desire?" If we each take the time to thoroughly investigate what concepts we're attracted to on a fundamental building-block level, we can then perform an appraisal of another individual based on their embodiment of those concepts we find attractive.
Perhaps an analogy would help to clarify my point (and I do have one): the politics of sexual desire are akin to the politics of affirmative action. The latter seeks a localized remedy to the systemic symptoms of a society plagued by prejudice, rather than confronting the cause of the illness. Masking symptoms might make us feel better, but we're still sick and "Band-Aid" solutions aren't enough to staunch the bleeding. Just as it would be a mistake to police racism solely through legislature without some social discourse on what forces drive race relations, it doesn't help to focus on sexual discrimination without (and, I daresay before, as well) discussing why we like who we like.
Consider an employer that elects to only hire applicants from a particular group. Before having a charge of "groupism" leveled against them or considering themselves "groupist", it would help for them to identify what qualities they're looking for in an employee. By adjusting their focus to zoom in on the parts that create the composite whole they desire, they'll have the chance to pinpoint those qualities outside the group they were previously limiting themselves to, thereby increasing the pool of desirable applicants and allowing them to skim more cream from a substantially larger crop.
Paring my attraction to ("biological") men down to its base components offered me the opportunity to seek out those elements I find desirable in as many people as possible. I discovered that my attraction was not to men, per se, but to the nebulous construct that is masculinity. This led me to pursue the root of my desire in folks that, theretofore, I had written off for not belonging to the group stereotypically possessing the quality I found so appealing, such as transdudes and even women.
Going beyond the bounds of what society had set for me to be attracted to as a gay man, boundaries that I myself had unthinkingly adopted, was liberating in many senses. It freed me from the bland limitations of only consuming what I'd been served by the media, and eventually freed me from a binary gender identity as well. Somewhere in the process, it also opened up my eyes to experiencing qualities I admired in people with a gaze looking from outside the arbitrary checkboxes of "masculine" and "feminine".
For all the benefits that I have gained through action inspired by introspection, the (ongoing) process is not without challenges. However, I can joyfully say that, for me, eating the fruits of my labors outweighs the toil of tilling the field. In short, if more of us ask ourselves the question "How do I construct desire?", we're likely to find that we find a lot more attractive. Casting a wider net benefits everyone. How wide the net might be is, of course, a personal choice, and through the casting the fisher might be surprised at what eventually ends up on their plate, pleasing their palate.
