They begin with the first sentence: "Graysexuality is fascinating because we get to watch the process of a new orientation being constructed in real time." The writer is using "orientation" as shorthand for "sexual orientation," which it isn't. "Sexual orientation" means which sex one is attracted to erotically; it doesn't mean any particular variation of erotic object choice, desire, or practice. I admit that the term has been inflated to cover such aspects of human sexuality, but that's inaccurate, confused, and confusing. If "orientation" were correct in this case, it couldn't be a "new" one, because orientations are supposedly innate, part of our biology and nature; it might not have been noticed or labeled before, but like America, it was there before some sexological Columbus "discovered" it. And the territory covered by "graysexuality" does not appear to be anything new in human eroticism.
The writer also seems to think that "orientation" is the same thing as "identity," for the two terms are used interchangeably in the post. (This is not uncommon, unfortunately.) It's quite possible that a new identity is currently being constructed around "graysexuality," but that's a very different matter. When the New York Times published a long article on the "down low" in 2003, it occurred to me that a new erotic identity might be abuilding. Not "orientation," because men on the down low were either homosexual or bisexual in their orientations and behavior, but because some men were clearly using the term as an identity, distinguishing them from exclusively heterosexual African-American men and from gay or bisexual African-American men whose flamboyant self-presentation embarrassed them. (See Terrence Dean's autobiography, which I discussed here. He seems to have adopted "gay" as a label since then, however.) There was an interesting contradiction in the use of "down low" as an identity, because it means "secret" -- or "closeted," in gay jargon -- and if some men were going to refer to themselves publicly, openly, as "down low," the term's meaning was going to stretch pretty far. Imagine someone telling Ellen and her vast TV audience that he was closeted. Once you've told the world, you are not closeted anymore, by definition, though I can imagine some people would try to claim otherwise. As far as I know, though, "down low" didn't catch on as an identity, though like "closeted" it is still an attitude and a practice.
What is "graysexuality," then? The blogger Ozymandias provides numerous definitions in their post. Here are some, from the Asexuality wiki: graysexuals
It seems to me that these criteria are probably too diverse. Some people will recognize themselves in one or two but not the others. Ozymandias gives other examples, to which this also applies. And before long, we'll see more new identities being constructed, using one criterion and excluding the others. Then there will be gatekeepers, self-appointed boundary cops excluding those who, they believe, aren't real graysexuals. We've seen this already with "gay" and "homosexual," which cover too much ground for some people and not enough for others. Is the guy who penetrates another guy "a homosexual," or is it only the guy he penetrates? Is he homosexual if he enjoys being penetrated by other males, even though he penetrates women "avidly"? Is he "gay" if he's never danced shirtless in a Pride parade? Is a male who calls himself a woman, dresses as a woman, and seeks out male partners "gay," as such males classified themselves in the US until about the 1980s, or is he "transgender"? "Transgendered" used to be acceptable, but it was replaced with "transgender," and anyone who uses the former can expect to be the target of vitriol.Similarly, some people who might technically belong to the gray area choose to identify as asexual because it is easier to explain. For example, if someone has experienced sexual attraction on one or two brief, fleeting occasions in their life, they might prefer to call themselves asexual because it is not worth the bother of having to explain these one or two occasions to everyone who asks about their orientation.
- do not normally experience sexual attraction, but do experience it sometimes
- experience sexual attraction, but a low sex drive
- experience sexual attraction and drive, but not strongly enough to want to act on them
- people who can enjoy and desire sex, but only under very limited and specific circumstances
Gray-As may also append a gender orientation to the label, as in "Gray-heterosexual".
Similar considerations apply to "lesbian." Some women-eroticizing women reject the term because they associate it with two femme women performing erotically together for a male audience; some, because they associate it with uncouth working-class butches and femmes. I read somewhere the writing of an early twentieth-century womanizing woman who distinguished between "lesbian," "tribade," and "sapphist" as specific erotic practices; a tribade, as the term's etymology implied, rubbed vulvas with her partner; I don't remember which was which, but of the other two, one practiced cunnilingus and the other used her hand. Were these different "orientations"? Were they the 'true' meanings of the words? Of course not: words have no true meanings. The interesting question is how widespread these meanings were.
All of these patterns of desire and behavior are much older than the contemporary American terms for them. Even if you allow "orientation" as the equivalent of "identity," none of them are new, though many of them have been touted as new at various times. I have no stake in these disputes myself, I'm happy to be terminologically polyamorous, but I do expect people to use the terms they've defined consistently, and they mostly seem unable to do this.
Though I admit I wonder at times. Consider again "transgender," which is supposed to refer to having a gender identity at odds with the sex/gender one was assigned at birth. It's about people's subjective sense of themselves. So why do numerous academics, including trans academics, use it to refer to any and all gender variation, including visible behavior such as voice, dress, body language -- what's known as "presentation"? These may correlate with gender identity, but they are still conceptually or analytically distinct from "transgender" as it is officially defined. (I might be trans by the official definition, for example, without modifying the way I dress, let alone seeking sex/gender reassignment surgery. Or I might present myself in conventionally gender-discordant ways while still identifying with the sex/gender I was assigned at birth.) The excuse I've seen is inclusion, but that's not valid -- especially since it's common for them to reverse course almost immediately, and fall back on the official definition. That's equivocation, not flexibility.
When "queer" first gained traction as a reclaimed identity around 1990, there was considerable debate about whom it could include. Was the heterosexually married Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, an important academic Queer Theorist, "queer"? Could the straight women friends of gay men be queer? Sure, why not? (Everybody's queer but me and thee, and even thee's a little queer.) I think that you can draw the line pretty much anywhere you like, as long as it serves some useful end in terms of thinking, discussing, or living. The standards are, or should be, higher in professional academic discourse; in practice, as I've noted, they often are not.
It might be useful, for example, to distinguish between "label" and "identity." Consider "men who have sex with men," which was invented during the peak of the AIDS crisis as a hopefully neutral label for the purposes of AIDS education. It had numerous faults, among them that "sex" was not unambiguous: many people didn't think even of anal copulation as "sex." But it was a label, not an identity; some men may have thought of themselves, "identified," as men who had sex with men, but I've never encountered anyone who did. A label can still be valid even if the person doesn't think of him or herself in those terms, perhaps to evade stigma -- consider "racist" for example, a label almost all racists try to reject -- or if it refers to a trait that isn't salient to his or her sense of self. An example of this could be height: I am sixty-eight inches tall, but it's not my identity.
Another example is "monosexual," referring to people who relate erotically only to partners of one sex as opposed to "bisexuals" who relate erotically to partners of both sexes. I am certainly a monosexual, but it's not an identity. The word can be useful in discussion, though, and I can imagine situations where I might identify myself as monosexual, though it hasn't happened so far.
Ozymandias writes:
Indeed, we can see this with people whose experiences are equally far from the norm on the other side. A person with hundreds of sexual partners who’s had anonymous sex and who prefers to have sex two or three times a day might call himself “horny” or “slutty” or say he really enjoys sex; he will not characterize himself as having a sexual orientation related to being really really into sex.An ancient Roman man "will not call himself 'gay'" mainly because he speaks Latin or Greek, not English. It's not clear -- scholars are still debating it -- exactly what linguistic, social, cognitive space terms like "boy lover" or "woman hater" (or their local equivalents) occupied or demarcated in their historical context. In Japanese samurai male love stories, it seems that the Japanese equivalent of "woman hater" was used precisely to indicate that a man was interested erotically only in other males. "Boy lover" and "woman hater" seem to have functioned as identities for men who preferred other men as erotic partners. But in the 1950s and 1960s I used to see the English "woman hater" used in popular journalism to signify the same kind of males, males who would probably have labeled themselves "gay," "homosexual," perhaps "inverts."
Of course, this is very similar to the experience of gender-based attraction before the invention of heterosexuality. An ancient Roman man who is exclusively attracted to men might call himself a boy lover or say he doesn’t like women; he will not call himself “gay” and consider himself to be part of a group with all other gay men, opposed to all heterosexuals.
For that matter, as I indicated above, it's not clear what space "gay," "homosexual," or "queer" demarcate. They are disputed, contested, wrangled over. All three of them have become loan words to other languages, generally with some alteration of meaning. And, of course, "gay" went from an in-group code word to a neutral public term to a schoolyard insult within a generation, to the extent that some younger gay men thought it had always been pejorative.
Returning to Ozymandias, I'd also like to know why people who have a lot of erotic partners shouldn't have an identity for their particular life/erotic pattern. It's not as if they are considered the unmarked positive norm, after all. Some people, of both sexes I think, have tried to reclaim "slut" for just that purpose. "Promiscuous" can be and has been used for such people, but it tends to equivocate between being a descriptor, however badly defined, and a pejorative. Or remember how the sex-advice columnist Dan Savage had a conniption over a reader who identified as a "poly," or a polyamorous person. "Poly is not a sexual identity, PP," he scolded, "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.'" But an identity is not a "thing," it's a self-labeling and if I say I am something, it's one of my identities. As Savage is old enough to remember, many bigots have claimed that homosexuality isn't something you are, it's something you do. (Savage backtracked later, after his readers criticized him. Notice that he too seemed to equate or confuse "identity" and "orientation.")
I don't object to people defining themselves as graysexual, demisexual, or other identities that people have invented (and all identities are invented), since they clearly feel important to them, and I'm in favor of people defining themselves. I am interested, however, in having contexts where these labels and identities can discussed and contested. That extends, of course, to labels I apply to myself, such as "gay" or "fag." Whether it's okay for men to fall in love with other men, to have sex with other men, to build communities of men-loving men, is one question; whether the origin myths and other rationalizations we have invented to support and justify our loves are valid is another. I have my doubts about the discourse surrounding asexuality, just as I have doubts about the discourse surrounding gay men. I've criticized, for example, the attempt by one advocate for asexual visibility to come up with an evolutionary basis for asexuality -- not because I'm an anti-Darwinist but because I reject the Darwinian fundamentalism of his argument, and because he showed a disturbing ignorance of basic aspects of human sexual biology. None of which means that I reject people's right to refrain from sexual activity for whatever reason.
Once other people start using the term you've defined with such care, you lose control of its meaning and definition. Not because they intentionally distort it: it will drift regardless. That's the case, mind you, among academics writing for professional publication, where some rigor in language is to be expected, even if it doesn't occur in fact. Move outside of that restricted space of discourse, and the sky's the limit. When you enter the arena of public discussion at any level, though, you had better be prepared to justify your definitions and your arguments.
Which takes me back to the Asexuality Wiki's remarks about graysexuality vs. asexuality: some graysexuals, it says, might identify as asexual instead "because it is not worth the bother of having to explain these one or two occasions to everyone who asks about their orientation." Again: neither graysexuality nor asexuality is an "orientation." They are identities, and avowing an identity is supposed to inform other people of things about yourself that are important to you, if not to them. "Not worth the bother"?
Who asks you about your orientation anyway? Potential sexual partners? When you've reached the point where it's going to matter, it seems to me that a potential partner is entitled to a fuller and more accurate account of where you stand than a one-word brand name. As I've said before, if you can't give an accurate, honest answer, no classification system will help you. If you're not talking to a potential partner, your orientation or the level of your erotic drive is not their business. One of the really useful things I learned from the advice columnist Miss Manners is that you don't have to give detailed reasons why you're not going to have sex with someone, and there are many reasons besides asexuality or graysexuality why that should be.
