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.

A Real Life

I'm rereading Barbara Deming's A Humming Under My Feet: A Book of Travail (The Women's Press, 1985), which is a fascinating book.  It's about Deming's long stay in Europe in the early 1950s, when she was thirty-five or so.  That in itself makes it stand out among books of self-discovery, which usually are set earlier in the writer's life.  Deming had been struggling for a long time to save enough money to spend a year in Europe and establish herself as a writer.  Her father wouldn't pay for it because, he said, he didn't want her to become "dependent" on him.  When her grandmother offered to give her the money, however, he changed his mind.

A Humming Under My Feet began in 1952, when Deming wrote an opening chapter and sketched out how the book would proceed.  But friends to whom she showed the sample "couldn't help showing that they were embarrassed for me" (vii), and she abandoned the project for almost twenty years.  Her friends' embarrassment, of course, was due to her writing bluntly and casually about her love for another woman, to whom the book was addressed.  (Later, Jane Rule would take the same approach in her novel This Is Not for You.)  What amazes me is that Deming had written as unselfconsciously as she did about her lesbianism in 1952, when Cold War antigay bigotry was on the rise.  When she took up the book again in 1971, she had to reconstruct the period from notes and memory, and the result is a double vision like that of Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind, in which the older writer looks at the world both as her younger self saw it and as she saw it much later.

One thing I remember from my previous reading is that Deming surprised women in Italy and Greece because she was a woman traveling alone, without a male custodian.

The next morning I left to spend some time in Assisi.  On the train I managed a conversation with a group of women sharing the same compartment.  They were amazed that I traveled alone.  Without either parents or husband.  My parents must be dead, then.  Alive!  And I was here without them!  'Sola!' They whispered it -- the word marking me much more a stranger than the fact than the fact that I hardly spoke their language.  When we told each other our respective ages, it was my turn to be shocked by the differences in our lives. One of the women I had taken to be my mother's age was not much older than I.  A woman wrinkled as my grandmother was my smooth-faced mother's age...

'Sola!'  The word kept echoing in me.  Word uttered by the women in awe.  They had not my privilege to roam.  The whispered word named me privileged; it named me also outlaw -- one who fit no accepted norm [31].

I'm still only about seventy pages in, and I find a lot in Deming's writing that I identify with: her uncertainty about being a sojourner in other people's countries, and her sense that her own life is unreal compared to those of her heterosexual friends and relatives.  Some of this is due to being single and lesbian, not too surprisingly: she even let her brother Ben court and eventually marry a lover of hers, and when that love became pregnant, she kept trying to believe in the connection between them.

It seemed to me that I could feel her child stir within my own body.  I also wished that I could be that child and be born to her.  She wrote that when she thought of it as a girl, she imagined it to be like me.  Reading these words, my heart beat quickly and I imagined myself in her arms again, a tiny girl.  That imagining flickered and went out.  It was not with my life that she was pregnant.  She wrote that her shape was changing.  Yes, the child was changing her.  And once born, it would change her even more.  I sat on, letting this knowledge touch me.  Though she had married, I believed she loved me still.  Of course I knew that she also loved Ben; but I had clung until now to the dream that our lives could be joined together still, I didn't know quite how.  Until this letter, her marriage had not been more real to me than the love between us I knew to be still alive.  But the child she expected -- the child was changing her, and the child would also change the marriage.  I sat there, the letter in my hand -- in the flower-bright park.  Sat waiting for this birth.  Not able not to love the child, and not able not to dread it.  Sat wishing that I were the awaited new life [53].

There's more to Deming's sense of unreality than this, though: I believe that if she could have asked those around her whose lives seemed more substantial, they might well have told her that to them, their own lives felt shadowy and incomplete.  This is a consequence of the fact that other people's inner lives are not directly perceptible to us, as our own are.  We feel our every doubt, fear, and shameful craving, but not those of others.  It was a shock and a revelation to me when someone who seemed grounded and sure of himself told me that he didn't feel that way to himself at all; and when other people, later on, told me that I seemed stable and self-confident, it completed the revelation.  I wasn't freed of all insecurity and confusion, but it did stop me from imagining that I could have been free of them if I'd only been born someone else.

No True Neurotic

There's another attempt to define authenticity that has been on my mind, but I'm giving it a separate post.  I just read Martin Duberman's A Saving Remnant (The New Press, 2011), his dual biography of the gay/lesbian left pacifist activists Barbara Deming (1917-1984) and David McReynolds (1929- ), which is fascinating both because the subjects are such inspiring people and for its account of the social history in which they lived their lives and built their careers.

Martin Duberman was born in 1930, which makes him and McReynolds almost exact contemporaries.  I was born in 1951, which means I came of age along with a sea change in attitudes toward homosexuality, as well as about race and sex.  Sometimes I forget how much difference it would have made if I'd been born even ten years earlier.  Duberman mentions several times that gay people of the generation he shares with McReynolds found it difficult or impossible to get rid of the guilt and shame with which they'd been indoctrinated by their upbringing.  He misses, however, what looks like a coping mechanism that I think is more common among people of his age than it is among younger ones.  It hasn't completely faded away, of course, because there's still a strong antihomosexual (and antisexual) streak in American culture.

I'm referring to Duberman's repeated assertion that McReynolds

strongly believed – and in this he was way ahead of his time – that the real issue was exclusivity, that the rigid categories of “gay” and “straight” served to mask the reality that everyone felt erotic attraction to both men and women (“any man who is not potentially able … to have relations with another man is fully as neurotic as the homosexual who cannot relate to women”) [119].

In support of this claim, Duberman cites the research of Alfred Kinsey, with a boost from William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

Their in-depth studies of groups of gay and straight people – some of the latter overtly homophobic – both insistent on their exclusive orientation, were nonetheless found to have pronounced fantasies about having sex with people whose gender contradicted their conscious, stated preference [ibid.]

It has been a while since I read Masters and Johnson's Homosexuality in Perspective (Little, Brown, 1979).  Among the things I remember most strongly about it was their concern that women's superior sensitivity and sexual technique with other women should not be used as "recruiting" propaganda for lesbians.  Why not? I thought.  Certainly if you believe that people can be persuaded to become homosexual, they should be acquainted with what Masters and Johnson thought were scientific facts -- in this case, that men have very little staying power and pay little attention to the response of their sexual partners, compared to women.

Masters and Johnson also claimed to have converted (or "recruited," to borrow their terminology) homosexuals to heterosexuality in a two-week program with a 71% success rate.  When I read the book, I noticed that they had the same problems most conversion-therapy programs have: understandably, their "successful" patients were not eager to keep in touch with them after the program was over, so they had no way of knowing whether the change had been permanent.  Where follow-up was managed in other studies, reversion was common, and "success" limited to a few months.

In recent years, Masters and Johnson's program has come under suspicion.  Masters refused to show the raw data to his associate Robert Kolodny, who eventually concluded that the cases described in the book were dubious, and in later years Virginia Johnson herself declined to stand behind Homosexuality in Perspective, calling it a "bad book." 

Of course it could be that Masters and Johnson's other claims were valid, even if their conversion program was bogus.  One notable aspect of Homosexuality in Perspective was that it used a heterosexual control group, which is unusual.  I recall their finding that among the most common erotic fantasies they found in their subjects, regardless of sexual orientation, was that of copulating with someone other than one of their usually preferred sex.  The other most common fantasy was copulating with someone other than their partner.  What I don't recall, and maybe I should just go over the book again, is whether either of these fantasies was universal in their subjects, or merely most common.  I doubt very much that every single subject had these fantasies, but even if they did, Masters and Johnson were not doing a sex survey like Kinsey's: they did not even try to study a representative sample of the population.  They selected their subjects carefully, after interviews and medical workups.  It's ironic that the criticism often (and largely inaccurately) leveled at Kinsey -- that his sample was unrepresentative of the population at large -- is actually much more true of Masters and Johnson.  That doesn't by itself mean that their conclusions were invalid, because they were doing a very different kind of research than Kinsey.  But it does mean that you cannot generalize from their subjects to everyone else.  Their work does not prove that everybody is fundamentally bisexual (whatever that would mean), any more than Kinsey's did.

Kinsey may well have believed that everyone is basically bisexual, but his research found no such thing.  Fifty-four percent of his male sample turned out to be monosexual -- that is, either exclusively homosexual or exclusively heterosexual in their sexual outlet -- throughout their lives.  Duberman, who wrote a long and intelligent review of two recent biographies of Kinsey, knows better.  That so many people who do know better nevertheless distort Kinsey's work is interesting, and somewhat disturbing, given their usual disdain for the irrationality and ignorance of sexual conservatives, but they are still wrong.

Besides, this is all irrelevant.  According to Duberman, both Deming and McReynolds had some slight heterosexual experience (as most gay people seem to do, thanks to relentless social pressure to be heterosexual), and in his later life, after years of psychotherapy, McReynolds summoned up a few weak heterosexual impulses in himself, and then dropped the matter.  The notion that exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive homosexuality are both 'equally neurotic', while technically true (zero equals zero) often turns up among people of this era: Margaret Mead has been reported to have said the same thing, as has the maverick psychotherapist Albert Ellis, and quite a few people have quoted it around me over the past several decades.  When I was younger I took it more seriously myself, before I figured out what was wrong with it.

Most blatantly, this claim is an attempt to moralize sexual orientation -- to claim that one sexual orientation is healthier or morally superior to another.  That would have to be argued, not simply asserted ex cathedra, and I'm not aware of any evidence to support it.  It sounds especially odd from the lips and pens of people who accept a medical model of sexual orientation, holding that it's not chosen (and is therefore morally neutral). And I can grasp the notion that someone who shuts himself or herself off from a whole sub-range of sexual experience might validly be classified as "neurotic," though I don't agree.  For one thing, how far do we extend the range of experience that we are required to explore?  A bit of s/m, maybe?  Water sports?  Or does this requirement extend only to sexual orientation?  If so, how much heterosexual experience am I required to have before I'm allowed to say No to having any more?

Try this analogy.  I'm left-handed, though somewhat bi-manual: I write and eat with my left hand, but I play guitar right-handed, and so on.  Some people are more strictly handed, other less so.  Now imagine someone telling me that I'm neurotic if I won't try to be more ambidextrous.  I would demand some evidence for the claim in the first place, but more forcefully I'd ask what business it is of theirs anyway.  If this seems an outlandish comparison, remember that left-handedness has been demonized in many cultures, and well into the twentieth century American southpaws were often forced by their teachers to use their right hands in the classroom.  Testing the limits of one's comfort zone is all very well, but it's for me to decide when, how, and how far I'm going to push mine.

Who gets to prescribe what sexual experience someone else must have, anyway?  I've argued before that (as far as I can tell) regardless of our sexual orientation, most individuals of our preferred sex are erotically unattractive to us, let alone the other sex.  Should someone be able to nag me to have sex with him just because I like males and he's male?  Some have tried, Cthulhu knows why.  I don't think anyone has the right to guilt-trip anyone else into putting out, for any reason.  No one should be made to feel inadequate because he or she is unattracted to any person, or any class of persons.  I may feel regret when I turn someone down, but I wouldn't want anyone I was interested in to have sex with me simply because I asked, regardless of whether he wanted to.

And this leaves aside other questions about sexual availability.  Some people have promised monogamy to their partners.  Monogamy is arguably unnatural, and it's after all only a lifestyle choice, but that doesn't entitle someone to claim that a partnered person is uptight for refusing to have sex with them.  They may well be uptight, but they are entitled to their uptightness.  Quite apart from sexual orientation, not everybody wants or chooses to pursue a wide range of partners.  That variation of human sexuality also needs to be respected, I believe.  We have the right to our irrational little quirks as long as they harm nobody -- and not having sex with someone is not harming them.  Literally dozens of people haven't had sex with me, and so far I've survived.

So I'm bothered by Duberman's question-begging reference to "the reality that everyone felt erotic attraction to both men and women," not least because it evidently wasn't even true for the guy who declared it a reality: he had to undergo therapy for years to persuade himself that he was even weakly attracted to a woman.  So first, you need to prove that it's a "reality," and then you need to give good reasons why I should pursue attractions, let alone copulation, with people I'm not conscious of being attracted to in the first place.  This does seem to be mainly a hobbyhorse of the generation of gay people just before mine; but Duberman chose to trot it out in a book published just last year.