Thursday, July 14, 2005

It's Like Genderfucking, Only With Sex

Alleyrat rant:

Many people have come to accept the notion of homosexuality but have a much harder time with bisexuality because it suggests a type of sexual flexibility or fluidity they find threatening. It is also much harder to pin people down into sex/gender categories if they tell us they are bisexual. We have our "gay man" category neatly figured; we've got our "lesbian" category; now we've got some new gender-related categories like the metrosexual, so we can sort out the dapper straights from the dapper gays; we've got "lipstick lesbians" for the femme dykes. But with bisexuals, it gets confusing. If John has a boyfriend one year, we see him as a gay man. But then, who is he when he shows up the next year with a girlfriend?

Bisexuality threatens the comforting straight/gay and man/woman binaries. (And the identity politics built around them). But it is also only the very beginning of sexual diversity. The simple fact is that sexuality is infinitely more complicated than which dirty pictures get you hard/wet, and the fact is that any one person's sexuality can shift over time or circumstance. And that it's sometimes impossible to tease out where gender and sexuality diverge.

For example: One of my high school boyfriends confessed to me, a few years after we broke up, that he had been getting blow jobs from an apparently "straight" friend of ours. The friend would come over, the two would smoke some weed, and then the friend would get to work on my ex. The Ex said that "if you close your eyes, it's just the same as getting it from a girl". But it wasn't, not really. Because (my hunch is) that this was an act that grew out of their particular friendship, their particular intimacy, their particular chemistry with each other. And it probably felt excitingly dangerous and taboo. And for my ex, more invested than our friend in thinking of himself as "straight", receiving felt like an okay, straight-ish thing to do. But giving would not have.

How do things like that fit into our rigid little categories of "straight" or "gay" or even "bisexual"? I don't think they do. I think the categories are almost worthless. (Except as community building and organizing/political strategies. Identity politics, again).....

So my point is: sexuality is not reducible to visual arousal, or even arousal. It's not reducible even to sex, or whom we have sex with. And sexuality is infinitely more complicated than these narrow little categories we have, as a culture, created for ourselves. Labels can pin people down, make them feel trapped, defined. "Bisexual", as a label, is the most open category. Though people tend to assume that a "true" bisexual would have equal desire for men and women (and if not, well, that means they're actually straight, or gay!) at least the bisexual label gives people room to move around in. Maybe I should start identifying as bisexual, as a political move. Maybe we all should.


Amen to that.

Read the rest.

10 comments so far. What are your thoughts?

Anonymous said...

strange to read your post, have been giving this and other things alot of thought lately, being one of those 3o something women, kinda lost, evolving in a sad way away from the comfort of my life.....wish I had a map...... 

Posted by Anonymous

Anonymous said...

why do my comments keep coming up as anonymous? have I got no computer skills at all? 

Posted by katagirl

Anonymous said...

I'll second that amen. I identify as lesbian because it's a label I feel comfortable with at the moment, but who's to say if that might change in the future (I mean, what if I fall for a transgendered person someday?).
I have a friend who's done quite a bit of queer exploration in her time, and enjoyed it, but defines herself as straight because she doesn't want to go down on a girl. Her internalized homophobia is just astounding. 

Posted by Andygrrl

Anonymous said...

but defines herself as straight because she doesn't want to go down on a girl. Her internalized homophobia is just astounding.  

You may actually want to add "internalized misogyny" to that...
 

Posted by Kameron Hurley

Anonymous said...

Sexuality is much more plastic than we imagine - plants have sex with each other and/or themselves, sometimes with the help of insects; many fish species have changeable (?sic) genders; primates engage in much sex that does not function only for reproduction. It's just part of life, and for us thinking apes, a very nice part if we get over the silliness and guilt. 

Posted by Buffalo Gal

Anonymous said...

Stupid study. I mean, I generally rate around 9 out of 10 people as "people I definitely would not have sex with". Show me a picture of these people and, well, I don't think so much would happen in the physically measurable department - at least not compared to if I saw the other ten percent.

But then, if you subscribe to the stereotype that men want to have sex with "everything that moves" the study is not biased in this way... I don't, and I think that could be an important bias mechanism. (Wonder if they chose standard-issue porn for pictures. Those people do not really represent what most of the population look like...)


 

Posted by Darjeeling

Anonymous said...

The discussions of bisexuality that have been cropping up all over lately baffle me. I mean really baffle. I guess it's a case for socialization -- I was brought up to believe that every human being is inherently bisexual. For some people, they like both genders equally, for others it takes a very special person to attract them to a gender that isn't their usual preference. Trying to follow arguments based on accepting one-gender preference as the norm throws me for a loop and a half.

Which makes me rather more sympathetic to people who react badly to having their assumptions challenged, come to think of it... 

Posted by Anonymous

Anonymous said...

When I was about 21 and decided that I prefered women, I took up the "lesbian" identity category. Now I rather wish I hadn't. Although I would say I'm about 80% woman orientated, I find being pinned down to a "lesbian" identity not much less oppressive than being "heterosexual." I don't think sexual identity categories are very helpful and am moving towards a "queer" position - which for me is more of a protest than an identity really. I don't want to be fixed or defined as any one "thing" without the possibility for change. Also, the demand that we must all be one thing or the other (hetero or homo, masculine or feminine etc etc) is a heteronormative demand, and as such, should be resisted. People who identify as bisexual or transgender are disturbing to anyone who's identity depends upon adhering to binary oppositions, I guess. Mind you, while the bi-phobia in the gay community is loathsome, I do think some self-identified bisexuals have been pretty insulting to self-identified homosexuals. For instance, when they argue that they have relationships with people rather than genders, that can be pretty rude! As if anyone one just has relationship with one kind of genitals! Bisexual superiortity can be pretty irrtating. Just becasue don't find your desires tied to one gender, that doesn't make you better than anyone who does.






 

Posted by Winter Woods

Anonymous said...

For some just being out is a matter of life and death

http://okrasoup.typepad.com/black_looks/2005/07/ugandan_governl.html 

Posted by owukori

Anonymous said...

I keep thinking about this. I'm biologically female but prefer to be socially male. I'm attracted almost exclusively to men. I consider myself straight, mostly because I know I'm the recipient of plenty of het privilege.

How I define myself would fill a book, but 90% of the people I encounter expect me to fit into one box or other. 

Posted by Nick Kiddle