My Really, Truly, True Sexual Orientation

Nobody will deny that the sentences of science can be classified into long sentences and short sentences, or that its statements can be classified into those which are intuitively obvious and others which are not.  Nobody will deny that such distinctions can be made.  But nobody will put great weight on them.* 

If only this were true!  I think that by "nobody," the philosopher and historian of science Paul Feyerabend meant "no sensible person."  But many people aren't very sensible.

My Facebook friend A posted a link to this item yesterday.  On Facebook it had the header "The Kinsey Scale Is Dead -- Here's What's Taking Its Place"; at least the post itself made no such claim.  That's the best that can said for it, though I must admit at the outset that it's on a site that has no real pretensions to seriousness.  A herself is very serious, however, a very very serious young person, so I expected something less fluffy.

Fluffy doesn't necessarily mean harmless, though.  The article begins:

When reality TV dumpling Honey Boo Boo Child declared that "everybody's a little bit gay" three years ago, she was unknowingly taking a page out of sexologist Alfred Kinsey's book. His famous Kinsey scale, which identifies people's levels of same- or opposite-sex attraction with a number from zero to six (zero being exclusively straight, six being exclusively gay), has been a favorite cultural metric for measuring sexual orientation since it was created in 1948. 

I presume that the author, Nicolas DiDomizio, believes that Kinsey found that "everybody's a little bit gay."  He didn't.  Half of his male sample were exclusively heterosexual in thought, word and deed throughout their lives; even more of the female sample.  The "Kinsey scale" doesn't measure sexual orientation, it's a graphic representation of sexual behavior.  If "gay" and "straight" are identities rather than quantities of sexual behavior, the Kinsey scale has nothing to say about them.  There's no way to measure sexual orientation, though I hear the Tarot is well thought of in some circles.

I was about to add that one's position on the Kinsey scale is not something one assigns oneself, but the result of taking Kinsey's lengthy interview protocol to collect one's sexual history.  That interview is not limited to homo/heterosexuality, by the way: it covers a lot more ground than that.  (Something to bear in mind when someone claims that the scale doesn't describe all aspects of sexuality: it's true, but then it wasn't intended to. It wasn't intended or designed even to represent all the varieties of sexual behavior on which Kinsey collected his data.  It was intended to make it easier to visualize the fact that many people's sexual histories are not either exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual.)  But then I noticed that the link to "Kinsey scale" in the quoted passage went to the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, and I clicked through.  That page includes this information:

How do I take the Kinsey test?
There is no ‘test.’ The scale is purely a method of self-evaluation based on your individual experience, and the rating you choose may change over time.
The scale ranges from 0, for those who would identify themselves as exclusively heterosexual with no experience with or desire for sexual activity with their same sex, to 6, for those who would identify themselves as exclusively homosexual with no experience with or desire for sexual activity with those of the opposite sex, and 1-5 for those who would identify themselves with varying levels of desire or sexual activity with either sex.

There's nothing to stop people from assigning themselves a place on the scale, of course, but that's not what Kinsey invented it for, and it's not how it was used in his big books.  To see the Kinsey Institute endorsing self-evaluation in their official site boggles my mind.  For one thing, according to today's popular folklore, you don't "choose" your position on the Kinsey scale, you're born there.

[P.S.  If you click through the Kinsey Institute's link, you'll find a very different text at the site.  I wrote to them about the questions I've raised here, and they not only replied graciously, they revised the page.  The new version is much better, in my opinion.  I'm leaving the previous version here for comparison.]

My next question, which also follows from DiDomizio's article, is why people would be interested in assigning themselves a place on the Kinsey scale in the first place.  DiDomizio's next sentence suggests one possibility: "But even though asking someone where they fall on the Kinsey scale is now a common dating website opener, the Kinsey scale is far from an all-inclusive system."  If there's one thing the scale was not intended for, it was a dating opener.

Asking someone where they fall on the Kinsey scale might be a bit more informative than asking them their sign or their major or where their grandparents were born, but not much.  Just because I am exclusively homosexual, for example, it doesn't follow that I will be attracted to any given male.  I can describe certain looks that often attract me, but even among those "types" there are many I'm not attracted to at all.  Contrariwise, I'm attracted to many males who don't fit those types.  For sorting through the people on a dating website, the Kinsey scale has no evident use.  The same job could be done by having people specify whether they're interested in dating males, females, or both.  The exact percentage of each -- and remember, a self-assigned Kinsey number provides no exactness at all -- is not going to help.  In my limited experience with dating sites, many men who label themselves "straight" are seeking out other males to have sex with.  I suspect that they call themselves "straight" in case anyone who knows them sees their profiles, to avoid stigma.  "Bisexual" would be more accurate, but (aside from not wanting anyone who knows them to see it on their profiles) many people have weird squickiness about that word; not because it doesn't sufficiently describe them, but because it has some kind of cooties that they can't or won't specify, or that make no sense when they try.  (The same is true of "gay" and "straight.")

All this is just prelude to DiDomizio's touting an epic new classification system, "the Purple-Red Scale of Attraction" (sounds like something you'd see at The Onion, doesn't it?), invented by a "Southern California man [named] Langdon Parks [who] recently realized, the [Kinsey] scale fails to address other aspects of human sexuality, such as whether or not we even care about getting laid in the first place."  (Goodness, all these labels!  Why can't we just, you know, be like, ourselves?)

So Parks designed a grid that "[l]ike the Kinsey scale, ... allows you to assign a number from zero to six to your level of same-sex or heterosexual attraction, but it also lets you label how you experience that attraction on a scale of A to F. A represents asexuality, or a total lack of interest in sex 'besides friendship and/or aesthetic attraction,' while F represents hypersexuality."

As I've already noted but might as well insist again, the Kinsey scale wasn't designed to allow you to assign a number to yourself.  But leave that aside.  Here's the product:

Complicated enough for you?  Amusingly and predictably, Parks has been criticized for not including more variables.  As with gender, once you start multiplying names for differences, it's hard to know where to stop.  It's easy to make fun of these ramifying categories, and maybe it's a little unfair, but by the time you've gone to the lengths Parks did here, you're already in the realm of the comic.

For example, it's certainly valid to notice that some people are slower than others to be ready to copulate.  (This has been named demisexuality, for no reason I can make out.)  It's important to be considerate of other people's limits if we want to have a relationship with them.  But is that a "sexual orientation," or even a major chunk of one?  Some men I'm ready to have sex with right away, in the institutions of promiscuity that gay men have cultivated.  Even in those zones, I may hesitate over whether a specific man will do for the moment's play; maybe he gives me bad vibes.  Outside of those zones, I may be much more reluctant, because outside of those zones copulation brings with it expectations of commitments of various kinds.  Or I may not be reluctant, depending on the man and the situation.  But again, even if I were much more consistent, would that count as sexual orientation?

Then there are the pitfalls of self-evaluation I've already alluded to.  Often I've met men who said they 'liked to get to know the other person before having sex.'  In practice, this usually meant five to fifteen minutes of conversation before they grabbed my crotch.  Which reminds me of Annick Prieur's wry account of vestidas in Mexico City:**

Some added that they enjoyed being reserved during the initial flirt, letting the man take the initiative. As far as I can judge, however, this is far from true; they are about as coy as starving ravens. Flaca is one of those who claimed to be coy. But when I asked her how she expresses this, it all boiled down to her not actually grabbing the sexual organs of the men she accosts.

I also suspect that some people fend off their prospective partners' advances because for temperamental reasons they want to make the first move. Maybe that wish is also a sexual orientation.

DiDomazio claims that Parks's grid "acknowledges the shades of grey in sexual orientation and sexual interest. Both, he explained, are fluid and largely dependent on context."  Actually, nothing in the article shows how the grid covers either fluidity or context-dependence: the two axes insist on putting yourself into a particular box.  Taking fluidity and context into account would complicate the grid impossibly, though.  "I'm not interested in sex until the fifth -- not the fourth, not the sixth -- date, for purposes of pleasing my partner until I get bored with them, whereupon I start looking for another -- unless my partner decides to break up with me first, in which case I will fasten myself to them like a leech" is one possible case, and I can't see how to fit it into Parks's system.

But Parks believes that having a simple tool like the Purple-Red Attraction Scale can be useful, particularly as a way to improve communication in the dating world. "The scale was designed to provide a quick and easy way of scoring a person's view of relationships on forums and dating sites," he said. Imagine, for instance, if you logged onto OkCupid and entered your sexual orientation as D5, instead of simply self-identifying as "gay," "straight" or "bisexual." 

Parks also noted that the Purple-Red scale is a great way to match partners who have similar or compatible sex drives. "Attraction type is every bit as important as orientation," he told Mic. "We see it all the time: John wants sex, sex, sex, while Jane doesn't have the feeling right away."

The Purple-Red grid isn't really simple, in my opinion.  From what I've seen of dating sites, including OK Cupid, they already try to account for differences in erotic style.  Where "sex drive" is concerned, Parks's system is really no help, though that was something Kinsey studied even if it wasn't a factor in the homosexual/heterosexual continuum.  One of his primary goals in studying human sexual behavior to was to get a sense of its range.  One person might need several orgasms a day, another might feel the urge once a month, or less often.  As for that closing sentence about John and Jane, remember the scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall where his therapist asks him how often he and Annie have sex, and he replies "Hardly ever -- three times a week"; her therapist asks her how often they make love, and she replies, "All the time -- three times a week."  Frequency is subjective, and it often changes over the life of a relationship: at first you can't keep your hands off each other, but after a few months you can.  The quality of the sex changes too.   For some couples it changes differently, but that's one more variation that Parks doesn't map.

I suppose there's something to be said for this parlor game if it encourages people to recognize the variety of sexual tastes and needs, to feel better about their own differences, and to communicate with each other about them.  But it seems to me that these schemes are as likely to have the opposite effect: to encourage people to put themselves in ever-smaller boxes.

Parks's system reminds me of other popular self-classification schemes I've heard about.  In the 90s there was the Bear Code, a maniacally complicated system favored by some men I talked to online.  I mean, isn't your beard or the lack of it a crucial factor in your sexual orientation?  Why didn't Langdon Parks factor it into his scale?  Before that there was the Hanky Code, by which a (usually) gay man signaled his erotic tastes (oral, anal, piss, fisting, dominance) by the color of the handkerchief he carried in his back pocket, and his role (top/bottom) by whether it was in the right or left pocket. (Q: What if you can't distinguish between a purple, a lavender, or a magenta hanky?  A: Then you're not really gay, bitch.)  His key ring also signified something or other, depending on which side he wore it.  Of course reality was more complex, with the significant sides reversed on the East and West coasts.

When a gay politico couple from New York came to speak at IU in the early 70s, one hopefully sophisticated young queen (not moi, if you're wondering) asked them about the hanky and key codes and which side was which.  One of our visitors gave the standard reply, that they varied depending on which coast you were on; the other then chuckled, "Except in February, which hath twenty-nine," and added, "In general, if you want to know, you ask."  Exactly.  And if you can't give an honest answer, no classification system will help you.

*Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (Verso, 1975), page 168. Quoted in Feyerabend and Scientific Values: Tightrope-Walking Rationality by Robert P. Farrell, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 158-9.
** Annick Prieur, Mema's House (Chicago, 1999), page 174.

All Along the Kinsey Continuum

This weekend I reread Conversations about Psychology and Sexual Orientation (NYU Press, 1999), by Janis S. Bohan, Glenda M. Russell, and several other contributors.  The book is an attempt to sketch out a social-constructionist approach to sexual orientation in clinical practice and in public policy; I first read it soon after it was published, and remembered that some of it was interesting and useful.  I decided to reread it to see how it looked to me now, especially after having read a lot more on the subject in the past fifteen years.  I'll probably have more to say about it later, but for now I want to lament that the authors have made the same error about Alfred Kinsey's work that so many other writers on sexual orientation have made.

Bohan and Russell write:

Perhaps more striking is the persistent plausibility of this dichotomous portrayal given that, even within this culture, its inadequacy was established more than forty years ago, when Kinsey and his colleagues demonstrated that this binary depiction of sexual orientation is flawed.  Their work revealed, instead, a range of self-reported sexual orientation described not by discrete categories but by a seven-point continuum, ranging from exclusive homosexuality (six on Kinsey's scale), through varying degrees of bi- or ambisexuality (scores of five to one), to exclusive heterosexuality (zero on the scale)...

Kinsey's work also suggested that sexual orientation is not entirely defined by sexuality per se; an individual's placement along the continuum reflected both overt and "psychic" reactions.  In addition, Kinsey's findings indicated that people's self-defined positions along this continuum may change over time and that many subjects identified periods in their lives when their sexual orientation was quite different from how they later identify themselves.  Thus, sexual orientation is portrayed by Kinsey's work is composed not of discrete categories, whatever the number, but of vague, permeable, and potentially shifting "locations" along a continuum [86-87].

Kinsey's work does not "portray" sexual orientation, self-reported or otherwise.  The Kinsey continuum represents sexual experience or "outlet" (to use Kinsey's term), overt behavior or "psychic" response.  I remember that his colleague Wardell Pomeroy wrote later about someone (who may have been his client rather than someone whose sexual history he took for Kinsey in the 1930s and 1940s) who thought of himself as homosexual until Pomeroy pointed out that he had more heterosexual experience than homosexual, but I don't recall Kinsey addressing this sort of thing in his big books.  He did, as I've mentioned before, refer once to "orientation" in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, when he referred to "younger males" who "may even have all of their overt experience in the homosexual" because they "have not ventured to have actual intercourse with girls, while their orientation is definitely heterosexual" (641).  But that's the only time he uses the word in the book, and in context it's clear that by "orientation" he means something like "predominant interest."  The Kinsey continuum refers only to sexual experiences, not to sexual orientation as it's talked about today.

I have no idea where Bohan and Russell got that bit about "many subjects [who] identified periods in their lives when their sexual orientation was quite different from how they later identify themselves."  I suspect it's because of the way Kinsey and his colleagues organized their data, for example, that 10 percent of the male subjects' experience (again: not "orientation") was more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.  That's not the subjects talking, it's the researchers.  And since the data refer to experience, whether overt expression or conscious attraction and desire, it doesn't necessarily indicate a change in "sexual orientation": it may indicate a change in circumstances, opportunity, environment, or something else.

For example, a friend was shocked to find that while his father was stationed near San Francisco in the military before he married, he had some sexual experience with other men.  Being 1) young, 2) in uniform, 3) unattached and 4) located near a gay mecca made him accessible to gay men who are attracted to military trade and cultivate them, often generously.  When he was discharged and moved back to the rural Midwest, such opportunities dwindled.  He could have begun seeking out male partners -- they can certainly be found here -- but apparently he didn't.  It appears that he viewed his experiences with men in the Bay area as something that didn't count, since he was far from home and the military was a temporary gig; think of him as a sexual tourist.  He married heterosexually and raised two sons, one of whom turned out to be gay.  So my friend's father could have been a 4 or 5 on the Kinsey continuum based on his youthful experiences -- it's compatible with having a lot of homosexual experience for three years, followed by decades of exclusively heterosexual outlet -- though without getting his full sexual history it's impossible to know.  Did his "orientation" change?  There's no way to tell, because we have no way to measure sexual orientation.

True, the kind of experience a person has over time may tell us something about his or her "sexual orientation," but only a part of it.  Maybe it's like a student's grade point average as a sign of "intelligence" (another murky concept): chances are an intelligent student will have a high GPA, and a less intelligent student a lower one.  But the actual number will depend on various factors: which school he or she attends, for example.  A highly intelligent student may do badly in school because of stress, the inability to focus because of the distracting diversions of campus life, having chosen the wrong major, and many other factors.  A less intelligent student can still have a high GPA through working hard and consistently, choosing one's courses strategically, and so on.  And -- rather like the Kinsey continuum -- a student's GPA can move up or down the scale, but it's not likely to move from a 1 to a 4 GPA in four years, just as one's position on the Kinsey scale is not likely to move from 6 to 0 or vice versa.  One's declared identity can change that drastically (for equally diverse reasons), but one's sexual history is cumulative, and not directly a measure of one's inner nature any more than average grades are.

Perhaps some reader will ask me how I can claim I'm right about this, when all these other smart, credentialed people get it wrong.  I read the damn book, that's how.  I do wish I understood how so many smart, well-trained people can get Kinsey's work so wrong.

Orientationalism

The book I'm reading today contains the following sentence:

Kinsey described people’s sexual orientation on a point scale from zero to six, again mostly based on their behavior (what they did and with whom).

It doesn't matter which book it was, because the substance of the sentence turns up in so many others, as well as in daily talk about human sexuality.  What does matter is that it's incorrect. The author is an academic psychologist, so he's passing along this misinformation to his students, as well as to readers of his book.  Reading it today was the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were.  Since I was in the public library at the time, I went to the stacks and found Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin, published in 1948 by W. B. Saunders in Philadelphia, and turned to the chapter on homosexual outlet.

As I've said before, Kinsey did not "describe ... sexual orientation."  The term doesn't appear in the book, in fact, though on page 641 he mentions "younger males" who "may even have all of their overt experience in the homosexual" because they "have not ventured to have actual intercourse with girls, while their orientation is definitely heterosexual."  This is the only time the word "orientation" appears in the entire book, and in context it's clear that he's using it to mean something like "predominant interest," not a fixed biological or psychological mechanism as the term is commonly used nowadays.

In fact, Kinsey repudiated any such notion.  In 1941 he had published a couple of papers demolishing hormonal theories of homosexuality, and he repeated throughout the chapter on homosexual outlet that he rejected the concept of homosexuals (or heterosexuals) as discrete kinds of persons.  The space he devoted to developing and explaining sexual experience as a continuum was one way he tried to undermine that concept.  (Despite this, he referred in the text to homosexual persons, though in context he clearly meant the term as shorthand for "persons with significant amounts of same-sex erotic experience.")

This can also be seen in his discussion of bisexuality.

As previously pointed out, it is rather unfortunate that the word bisexual should have been chosen to describe this intermediate group. The term is used as a substantive, designating individuals – persons; and the root meaning of the word and the way in which it is usually used imply that these persons have both masculine qualities and feminine qualities within their single bodies. We have objected to the use of the terms heterosexual and homosexual when used as nouns which stand for individuals. It is similarly untenable to imply that these “bisexual” persons have an anatomy or an endocrine system or other sorts of physiologic or psychologic capacities which make them partly male and partly female, or of the two sexes simultaneously [656-7].

… It [“bisexual”] should, however, be used with the understanding that it is patterned on the words heterosexual and homosexual, and, like them, refers to the sex of the partner, and proves nothing about the constitution of the person who is labeled bisexual [657].

He concluded,

The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece ... and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not as taboo as it is in our own, suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or of the opposite sex, is basic in the species. That patterns of heterosexuality and patterns of homosexuality represent learned behavior which depends, to a considerable degree upon the mores of the particular culture in which the individual is raised, is a possibility that must be thoroughly considered before there can be any acceptance of the idea that homosexuality is inherited, and that the pattern for each individual is so innately fixed that no modification of it may be expected within his lifetime [660].

In rereading the previous paragraph I noticed something odd.  We don't really know much, if anything, about the incidence of homosexual desire or behavior in any culture, including ancient Greece.  What we do know is that sex between males was less taboo there, though it was also regulated and restricted in various ways.  We know this because of the documentation of such relationships in "mainstream" Greek literature and discourse from that period.  But no one ever did a systematic survey like Kinsey's to find out how many Greek men actually had sex with other males.  And despite the very strong prohibition and stigmatization of sex between males in early twentieth-century America, Kinsey found that its occurrence was very wide indeed.  It could be that even in those supposedly more tolerant societies, the actual occurrence of sex between males might be no greater than it is here and now.  We have no way of knowing.

Kinsey's strictures on biological explanations of homosexuality have not been confronted by later researchers.  Indeed, most researchers today have tried to ignore what he said and wrote, often by misinterpreting, or misrepresenting, or simply misunderstanding it. His criticism of hormonal theories was simply ignored, and the same inadequate concept of "the homosexual" is standard in research today.

Of course, it's quite possible that Kinsey was wrong.  But he hasn't been shown to be wrong.  There was a graduate student with whom I had some conflicts when I first began running the GLB Speakers Bureau at IU, who told me in one of his more conciliatory moods that sex research had "moved beyond Kinsey."  I told him that it looked to me as if it hadn't yet caught up with Kinsey.  It should be remembered that Paul Gebhard, one of Kinsey's original team and later head of the Institute for Sex Research, tried to discredit Kinsey's numbers for the incidence of homosexual behaviors.  To that end Gebhard removed all histories of prisoners and others who might have "contaminated" the sample and tabulated the results all over again -- but he found that the percentages dropped only a tiny amount: from 37% to 36.4% for males who'd had at least one sexual experience to orgasm with another male, for example.  Despite this, people who should know better continue to accuse Kinsey of overcounting homosexual experience because he included prisoners in his sample.

Another graduate student, a decade or so later, conceded that the Kinsey scale wasn't intended to refer to or measure "sexual orientation," but declared that sex researchers use it for that purpose today.  She didn't, however, explain how those researchers measure "sexual orientation."  There isn't, to my knowledge, any way to do it.  Today's researchers either allow subjects to assign themselves a number on the Kinsey scale, or administer to them a version of Kinsey's interview; the result is called their sexual orientation.  Since the interview can at best only count overt sexual experience, and a very impressionistic account of desires and fantasies, the result remains a sexual history, not a measure of sexual orientation.  (As the quotation about inexperienced younger males above indicates, experience is considerably affected by the availability of willing partners, as much as it is by one's own predilections.)

I think that what's going on here is that the biological sexual-orientation model is so dominant today that even people who've been trained to know better impose it on all discussion of human sexuality.  The psychologist I quoted at the outset simply took it for granted that in writing about homosexuality, Kinsey was describing "sexual orientation," although he wasn't and would have rejected the concept.  I wouldn't be surprised if he has never actually read the chapter on homosexual outlet in Sexual Behavior in the Male. (Just as I suspect that most people who quote Foucault's famous aphorism about the Origin of the Modern Homosexual have never read The History of Sexuality.)  Why bother?  Everybody knows what Kinsey said.  And everybody knows he was wrong anyway, and sex research has moved beyond his clumsy, primitive beginnings.  If I hadn't been conditioned by the authority-skeptical ethos of Gay Liberation, I might think the same way.