Below is Indy.com writer Neal Taflinger’s response to Konrad Marshall’s column about redheads and sexuality @ www.indy.com/forums/talk/thread/...>

One of the first things I ever knew was that I was different. Women fawned over my hair, people foisted incredibly annoying nicknames on me, and I learned that I didn’t have to say or do anything particularly memorable in order for people to remember me. Luckily America – at least the small part of it I grew up in – doesn’t share the British and Australian hostility to gingers, so I mostly escaped teasing. I suffered sun burns more frequently, and more seriously, than my friends, had more than
my share of ear infections, and learned the hard way that redheads are naturally more resistant to anesthesia than the less interestingly-coiffed 98% of the Anglo population (it’s true, look it up). I was…ok, am, short-tempered, but so is my father and he was born towheaded. As for my sexual appetites and predilections, all that I can say is that I’ve always seemed normal to me.

With few exceptions – sexual orientation and gender identity chief among them – I think that sexuality is a matter of nurture, not nature. No one is born with an aversion to oral sex or a deep-seated desire to be saddled and ridden like a pony. Like most anything else that we do, what we have experienced and the emotional baggage we’ve accumulated along the way effects the way we view our sexual selves as well as our partners. So if a small percentage of the population grows up knowing they are
different, standing out from the crowd for no other reason than two people with recessive genes happened upon each other and made them, it makes sense that they would be a little daring, a little adventurous. After all, aren’t others’ perceptions of us what stops us from doing any number of things that pop into our heads?

How many times have you stopped yourself from singing in a restaurant, dancing on a sidewalk, or telling someone what you actually think because people might think you’re strange. How many times have you arbitrarily limited your options because of other people’s hang ups? Now imagine how liberating it would be to start with the assumption that people think you’re somehow different and strange. Imagine what you would do if you could stand out from the crowd and really own it and not worry about
what anyone else is thinking or doing. Redheads are really no different from the rest of the populations, we just operate under different expectations, expectations we’re usually more than happy to live up to.

Oh, and Konrad – if you ever call me “Ranga” I will knock your jaw clean off.