A Few Brief Notes

I mentioned the other day that many people conflate or confuse "sexual identity" and "sexual orientation."  Earlier this evening I was on a GLB panel speaking to an undergraduate class on human sexuality.  I noticed when we walked in that the instructor had projected a PowerPoint slide on the classroom wall, listing some "sexual orientations."

HOMOSEXUAL

HETEROSEXUAL

BISEXUAL

QUEER

PANSEXUAL

I'm quoting that list from memory, so I may have left out some.  I don't remember if GAY and/or LESBIAN were on the list, but they might have been.  I'm sure about those I quoted here, however.  The alert reader will have already noticed that some of the terms are not sexual orientations but identities: queer, and (I would argue) pansexual.  The latter is disputable, depending on what you consider a sex; several of our younger volunteers prefer the label pansexual because they are attracted to transgender and intersex people, so bisexual doesn't include enough sexes.  I think that pansexual is an identity that covers the same ground as bisexual, but maybe I'm an old fogey.  (I first encountered pansexual in the mid-1970s, in a rock-magazine article about Country Joe McDonald that I'll try to track down, but of course it meant something different then.  Just as bisexual has different meanings depending on context.)

Queer, however, is definitely an identity and not a sexual orientation.  The same would be true of gay or lesbian, had they been listed.  So why, in a college-level course on human sexuality, was this misinformation being disseminated to students?  I'm wondering if I ought to write the instructor and ask about this.  But for now, I just want to point it out as an example of the confusion I talked about before.

A big news item of the past few days is the coming-out of Michael Sam, a college football player who's moving into the pros this year.  Sam had told his team about himself in his senior year, and they all evidently adjusted with no problems, going on to a very successful year.  This is a novelty for professional sport, the first time a player came out at the outset of his career, rather than in its twilight or after it was over.  Of course the media are all trembly about this prospect.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good piece on the story, which includes a quotation from another player, Jonathan Vilma of the New Orleans Saints.  Here's a longer version of the same quotation, and you can see him say it on camera in this Daily Show clip.

"I think that he would not be accepted as much as we think he would be accepted," Vilma added. "I don't want people to just naturally assume, like, 'Oh, we're all homophobic.' That's really not the case. Imagine if he's the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine, and it just so happens he looks at me. How am I supposed to respond?" 

The Huffington Post article quotes "OutSports' Cyd Zeigler [who] suggested Vilma respond the way someone would to anyone who's looking in the shower: Tell a joke or just keep chatting like it never happened."  I think even this is reading Vilma too generously.  What Vilma seems to have meant by "looks" was something like "undresses me with his eyes" -- never mind that he's already "dressed, naked ... the whole nine."  After all, when a bunch of people are naked together they will look at each other; it may or may not mean anything.  What Vilma is afraid of is that a gay player would admire him, look at him in order to lust after him.  He knows he'll be able to feel the scorch of that lust, his tender skin will grow hot under it.  And then who knows what will happen?  I know it's unfair to suspect all homophobes of harboring secret gay desires, but Vilma really seems to be fantasizing there.

At least no one seems to have jeered that no self-respecting homosexual would want to have sex with an ugly toad like Jonathan Vilma; we're talking about a professional athlete here, it's very likely that many gay men would love to enjoy the riches of his body.  Jon Stewart handled the issue better.  I think there's no real way to reassure the Jonathan Vilmas of the world, and my answer to questions like this has always been that they can never know that other men haven't been scoping them out in the shower all along.  Indeed, the more men they've shared showers and locker rooms with, the better the odds that there have been gay or bisexual men among them, some of whom very likely just so happened to look at him.  He wouldn't have noticed.  What terrifies Vilma is knowing that one of his teammates is gay.

One commenter under some article I can't remember right now demanded that if there are going to be gay athletes out there, we must have segregated shower rooms -- one for the gay ones and one for the straight ones.  But that won't work, because the gay room would only house openly gay or bi players.  The closeted ones will still be lurking amongst the straight players, just so happening to look at them.  The only solution I can think of is private locker rooms and showers, or perhaps special locker room and shower garments so that modest men like Jonathan Vilma can cover their nakedness from the lustful eyes of other men, and of themselves.

Poly Wanna ... ?

Dan Savage, by contrast, gave me the giggles last week.  His latest column includes a letter from a " 30-year-old straight man who has always known that he is a poly."  ("Poly" being short for "polyamorous.")  This man is romantically involved with a woman who "is a monogamous person."  His question: "Can someone who is poly be happy with someone who isn't?"

Dan got into a big huff.

You are not “a poly.”

Poly is not a sexual identity, PP, it’s not a sexual orientation. It’s not something you are, it’s something you do. There’s no such thing as a person who is “a poly,” just as there’s no such thing as a person who is “a monogamous.” Polyamorous and monogamous are adjectives, not nouns. There are only people—gay, straight, bi—and some people are in monogamous relationships, some are in open relationships, some are in polyamorous relationships, some are in monogamish relationships, some are in four-star-general relationships. These are relationship models, PP, not sexual identities.

He was partially right.  Polyamory is not a sexual identity, because "sexual identity" means your sense of yourself as male or female.  (Which is not the same as being male or female.)  Nor is it a sexual orientation, since "sexual orientation" refers to the sex of the persons you are erotically interested in.  But both of these words get thrown around carelessly in ways that chips away at their actual meaning.  "Sexual orientation," for example, has been incorrectly applied to pedophilia, although children are not a sex.  "Sexual identity" is routinely confused with "sexual orientation."  This happens partly because of the ambiguity of "sex" and "sexual" in English, an ambiguity which many people seem bent on muddying even more than it already is.

But Savage is wrong that there's no such a thing as a person who is a "poly": he's answering a question from such a person.  The distinction between adjectives and nouns in English is vague, as is the difference between a person who does something and a person who is something.  There is no reason why a person who prefers non-monogamous relationships shouldn't "identify" as a poly, or just as polyamorous.

Savage's declarations can just as easily be applied to gay people, and have been.  For example, a homosexual relationship is a relationship (usually erotic) between two people of the same sex; you might say, and probably should say that "homosexual" is a relationship model, not a kind of person.  A homosexual, or bisexual, or heterosexual, is not a kind of person, any more than a Protestant or a Catholic is a kind of person. Gore Vidal insisted that this was the case for decades, as did Alfred Kinsey.  Indeed, one of the enduring claims of human sexual behavior and stigma-avoidance is that only one person in a homosexual act is "homosexual": the other, if male, is "trade," "normal," a "real man."  Just because you've, you know, experimented once or twice or a hundred times with gay sex, that doesn't mean you're gay; maybe you're just bi-curious.  Two male homosexuals fooling around together is "lesbianism."  This assumption also underlies most current scientific research on "sexual orientation."

Given the way language works, though, I don't see how it is unreasonable for people to refer to themselves by nouns or adjectives that refer to their relationship models, to the work they do, the religion they practice, the country they were born in, the language they speak, the hand they favor for writing, and so on.  This only becomes a problem when a person starts to believe that claiming an identity is evidence of the "kind of person they are."  It doesn't prove that you were born that way, or that your identity is your nature, or anything like that.  Many gay people, including Dan Savage, do make this mistake, but it is still a mistake.  He can see that when his poly reader makes it, but not when he makes it.

And yet, it doesn't seem implausible to me that a person might prefer non-monogamous relationships, or monogamous ones, as a matter of temperament.  This aspect of temperament might be influenced by biological factors, even (gasp!) by one's genes.  I'm sure that an enterprising psychologist would be able to generate plenty of meaningless correlations that would be used to argue just that, a genetic basis for nonmonogamy.  (Indeed, Dan himself enthusiastically endorsed a book which argued that human beings, especially males, are 'naturally' nonmonogamous.  How soon we forget... )  In which case it's not going very far at all to claim polyamory as a temperament, an essence, a kind of person.  Kinds of person are defined in all sorts of ways that have nothing to do with biology: language, place of national origin, marital status, religion, occupation.  And once you've opened the door to the idea that gay people could claim same-sex desire as a basis for identity, why not accept "poly" as an identity?  You have to give good reasons why not, but Dan Savage only offers ex cathedra pronouncements.  Why does he react so strongly against the idea?

Our Precious Sexuality Fluids

In this week's column, Dan Savage answers questions he received in written form at a college appearance.  I thought this one was interesting:

I’ve always considered myself a lesbian, but a few weeks ago, I got really drunk and slept with one of my male best friends. Am I not a lesbian?

Female sexuality is a lot more fluid, as they say, and many lesbian-identified women have slept with men. Your sexuality identity—the label you choose to apply to yourself—should communicate the essential truth about your sexual interests and partner preferences. So you’re free to identify as a lesbian even if you slip and fall on the occasional dick.

His answer is thoroughly inadequate, but that's not entirely his fault, because there are no clear boundaries in this area.  As Savage says, many lesbian-identified women have slept with men, and (he might have mentioned) more than incidentally.  But I think he's wrong that "female sexuality is a lot more fluid" than (presumably) male sexuality.  Many gay-identified men have slept with women, and many straight-identified men have slept with men.  We have no idea how many, of course.  I considered invoking Alfred Kinsey here, but his research is really no help because he didn't study identities.  A lot of people say he found that 10% of the male population was gay, but they're wrong.  Kinsey found that 10% of the (white, incidentally) male population had mostly same-sex outlet to the point of orgasm for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55; he didn't report how they identified themselves.  We don't even know how the 4% of white males who had only same-sex outlet throughout their lives identified themselves.

I'm almost done reading Barbara Deming's A Humming Under My Feet, which I mentioned yesterday, and I'm struck, not just with how many times she records having let men have sex with her (read the book and you'll see why I put it that way) despite her knowledge that she only really desired and fell in love with women, but with how often she seriously considered marrying a man because that's what you're supposed to do: get married to a man, have his children, be a serious mature adult.  From Martin Duberman's account of Deming and her younger contemporary, the gay socialist David McReynolds in A Saving Remnant, it's clear that McReynolds's experience was similar.  Even more depressing, Deming abandoned her lover Nell to the courtship of her brother Ben, with the same rationale: a woman could only offer another woman a second-best kind of love.

But back to Dan Savage.  Just before the question from the lesbian, he answered this one:

I’m a guy who does not find guys physically attractive. Even so, I like to give and receive blowjobs with men. Does this mean anything about my sexual orientation?

Yes.

The question here, I suppose, is how many times you can have sex with someone who isn't covered by your sexual identity before it means anything about your sexual orientation.  Since part of the definition of "sexual orientation" is that you find people of that sex attractive, or as the American Psychological Association defines it:

Sexual orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).

(Except that sexual orientation isn't really "easily distinguished" from those other components: most people, including professionals, tend to confuse them.)  "Sexual identity," as I've noticed before, is a confused and confusing label.  It ought to mean which biological sex (male or female) one identifies as, but it's commonly used to refer to which sexual orientation one answers to.  "Sexual identity" is often confused with "sexual orientation," whose meaning is itself unclear due to the ambiguity of the word "sex."  (It's often used to refer to any erotic preference, which has led to pedophilia being called a sexual orientation even though children are not a sex.)  Even among professional sex researchers and other putative experts, the terminology for human sexuality is a mess.  Among us laypeople, it's totally incoherent.

It's tempting to say that labels are useless, and we should just get rid of them and be people.  Many people give in to that temptation, but I haven't noticed that they really get rid of labels.  Instead they just shift them around a little.  If I choose not to label myself, other people will be happy to take up the slack, so I think I had better be prepared to deal with that.  If I do label myself, they will misunderstand the labels, and sometimes I suspect that misunderstanding is deliberate.  Or maybe it's just the old "Don't stereotype me, but I'll stereotype you all I want" approach.

A disturbing aspect of Deming's experiences with males as she describes them in A Humming Under My Feet is that the men who tried to pressure her into copulation (and too often succeeded) just assumed that if they wanted her, she must want them back, or at any rate be willing and available -- especially since she was a single woman traveling alone; this made her fair game.  They wouldn't take a direct "no" for an answer, and she had to be quite insistent that she wasn't available to them.  One notable swine, a Greek sailor whose roaming hands she had to fend off for hours, finally sneered at her, "So you don't like men?"

I believe in love, I told him.  I added that I was sorry if he'd misunderstood me.  He gave a contemptuous shrug and strode off [218].

Even if her "sexual identity" had been straight or bi, she might simply not have wanted him.  To say so might have been dangerous for her, of course: male pride is touchy, and is often defended with violence.  That too is one of the inequities feminism rejects: that women must always be careful of men's feelings, though men needn't reciprocate. 

This refusal to take "no" for an answer is not limited to straights, of course.  Many people figure that if you're the right sex for them, they're the right sex for you, and if your "sexual identity" confirms that, then you are not allowed to turn them down.  They're allowed to turn others down, of course, because that's different. These issues are really prior to questions of identities and labels.  There's no real need to explain why you're turning down -- or, for that matter accepting -- someone's sexual overtures in terms of orientations or identities; simply saying "No, thanks" or "Yes, thanks" ought to be enough.  People with inadequate erotic manners won't be stopped by a mere identity: they'll be sure that they can be the exception to your orientation.

Identities aren't just individual phenomena, though, they're social, and ideally they help us to interact considerately with one another.    They're also used for solidarity and control, which has a downside too.  If someone asked me the same question that young lesbian asked Dan Savage, I think I'd turn it around: What would you say if another lesbian you knew asked you the same question?  Your answer to her would be my answer to you.