Straight (11 page)

Frighteningly, it was not only sexual misconduct that presented a threat to procreativity and proper gender. Noisy and complicated, crowded and stressful, the new urban, industrial world likewise ground away at one's constitution with its newspapers, train journeys, and dissipating entertainments. A man who could not withstand the pressures of modern life could easily become a hysterical, feminized, and impotent “neurasthenic.” Too feeble to perform properly as heterosexuals, neurasthenics and other “psychic impotents” might turn
to fetishes, voyeurism, exhibitionism, masochism, or even other men in order to get enough stimulation to overcome their debilitated state. Such sexual enervation, Austrian psychologist and sexologist Wilhelm Stekel argued, could even lead to murder, with the dagger or bullet becoming a stand-in for the penis that could no longer penetrate.

Deviance, it was clear, was everywhere. It was subversive and subtle and lurked even in the private and mysterious realms of thoughts and emotions. As people were made more and more aware of all the many ways in which deviance could infiltrate their lives, an undercurrent of sexual self-consciousness and self-examination became an increasingly commonplace experience. The mandate to avoid degeneracy meant knowing at all times that what one desired and how one behaved were above suspicion. Even the subconscious mind—a Freudian, and thus a contemporary, invention—was to be thoroughly interrogated with the help of psychoanalysis, lest it harbor hidden monstrosities. At any moment, it seemed, one could look into the mirror and find a degenerate looking back.

This is different in several important ways from the proto-gay subculture that formed around urban undergrounds of men who desired and had sex with men. In the entertaining and enlightening
Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830,
historian Rictor Norton reveals that well before any medical professional or lawmaker had a notion of something called a “homosexual” or a “heterosexual,” there were men spontaneously self-identifying and forming community based on their shared sexual desire for other men. These men were not only aware of their sexual commonality; they built culture around it: they called themselves “mollies” and called one another by feminine “maiden names,” dealt with what we would now call gay bashing and police harassment, and sometimes called upon priests known to be one of their own to perform funeral services for men who had been hanged as sodomites. Simultaneously informal and established, visible and underground, mollies and their subculture clearly existed.

This does not, however, make them the equivalent of modern-day gays. And it certainly does not make their non-molly contemporaries the equivalent of modern-day heterosexuals. The fact that small groups of eighteenth-century urbanites understood themselves to be
sexually different from the norm, and understood their sexual desires and preferences to have particular social significance, does not mean that those outside this subculture had any similar understanding of theirs. It particularly does not mean that those outside the molly subculture had any sense of themselves as being “not-mollies.” Indeed, why would they?

Yet this is precisely what it means to have the sense that one “is heterosexual”: to understand one's self to be part of a specific, distinctive sexual culture. The self-identification of small numbers of sexually non-normative individuals was not something that generated a sensibility of “the heterosexual” or “the normal-sexual” in the rest of the population. What generated this sensibility in the mainstream was the increasingly common experience of looking in the mirror to see if a deviant or degenerate looked back.

This self-inspection was not the result of a spontaneous inner desire to “know thyself” that was magically, simultaneously experienced organically by huge swathes of the European and North American middle and upper classes. It was triggered socially, by fear. Becoming sexually self-aware was a matter of pure old-fashioned self-defense.

Western culture acquired sexual self-consciousness on a grand scale because self-assessment offered ways to defend against being marked as a degenerate or deviant. Heterosexuals learned to experience heterosexuality—to think about themselves as “being” and “feeling” heterosexual, to believe that there is a difference between “being heterosexual” and “being homosexual”—because they needed, in newly official ways, to know what they
weren't.

Sexual irregularity was no longer really a matter for the Church. It had become, as Krafft-Ebing's introduction to
Psychopathia Sexualis
made clear, a problem for lawmakers, cities, and states. Anyone and everyone could be a sinner. By definition, in fact, everyone
was.
Sin was lamentable, but it was understandable, even expected. What was not understandable or expected, and certainly not excusable, were deviance and degeneracy. Nor were the stakes at all the same. This is where the concept and experience of this thing called “sexual orientation” come from. It does not stem from relatively small numbers of people wanting to signal to others like them the ways in which they were sexually outside the mainstream. It stems from enormous numbers
of people being very anxious about the possibility of seeing a degenerate in the mirror.

DEFINING “HETEROSEXUAL”

“Heterosexual” does not have a single standard scientific definition. Different disciplines, and indeed even different researchers within single disciplines, use the word to mean different things. This is more than merely incidental sloppiness. Scientific method and scientific authority depend in part on clear and consistent definitions that are supported by careful observation. Yet when heterosexuality is the subject, scientists all too often behave like Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty:

“When
I
use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you
can
make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”[
7
]

This is not merely a vocabulary problem or even an attitude problem. It is a scientific problem. In biological, physical, and social sciences, the lack of standardized definitions creates inconsistency and lack of clarity in research, and introduces serious problems to the process of interpreting data.

The potential meanings of “heterosexual” run a wide and problematic gamut. “Heterosexual” may simply be an adjective describing different-sexed individuals, specifically male and female, engaging in some sort of shared behavior. The behavior could be sexual or reproductive, but it need not be. “Heterosexual” pairs of monkeys might groom one another or fight over food. This doesn't necessarily tell us anything about whether the monkeys had any sort of sexual relationship, or whether there were or weren't particular social bonds between them. It just means that pairs of monkeys, each consisting of a male and a female monkey, engaged in particular social behaviors.

This is sometimes what “heterosexual” means even when the context of the study does have to do with mating or reproduction. Researchers
Ralph Greenspan and Jean-Francois Ferveur, for instance, discussed heterosexual courtship in
Drosophila
in a
Review of Genetics
article. [
8
] Here again, “heterosexual” means merely “different-sex” or “male/female.” It does not imply anything about what motivates the observed behavior, let alone anything about the subjective experience of the fruit flies under consideration. It certainly doesn't imply that there are also homosexual
Drosophila
who come out to their parents or hang out in itty-bitty fruit fly gay bars. “Heterosexual,” in the context of this article, just characterizes the biological sexes of creatures that happen to be engaging in a behavior related to sexual reproduction. It does not imply that these creatures are “heterosexuals” in the same way that humans might be.

So far, so good. But what happens to these simple, straightforward uses of “heterosexual” when what scientists actually
observe
in nature is not what they expected to find? What happens to “heterosexual” when the relationship between biological sex and sexual behavior does not conform to our expectations? In the 1970s, for example, endocrinologists conducted studies on rats treated with heavy doses of sex hormones that upended their normal hormone profiles. In rats, sufficiently high doses of sex hormones can override an animal's usual sexual behavior instincts, so that biologically male rats given heaping doses of estrogens will present their rear ends in the female-typical mating posture known as lordosis, while biologically female rats similarly treated with testosterone will mount them in the manner typical of male rats.

Scientists remarking on this research pointed out that these rats could be accurately described as behaving either heterosexually, in that they were engaging in sexual behavior with a rat of a different biological sex, or homosexually, in that the rats were engaging sexual behaviors that were identical to those that their different-sex partners would normally exhibit, female rats behaving as males toward males, male rats behaving as females toward females. Or the rats could be described as behaving
simultaneously
heterosexually and homosexually. It depended on which variable—the biological sexes of the participants, or the behaviors they engaged in—was seen as the one that counted more.[
9
] If “heterosexual” mating activity could, strictly speaking, encompass behavior completely unlike what is colloquially
understood by “heterosexual mating activity,” critics asked, how scientifically meaningful was the term “heterosexual”?[
10
]

Such ambiguities are compounded when “heterosexual” is used in regard to human beings. Does the researcher mean one of the types of “heterosexual” outlined above? Or is he instead referring to the variable and dynamic mixture of cultural identity, emotional response, sexual desire, physiological arousal, economic and social role playing, erotic activity, and reproductive potential that we mean when we use “heterosexual” in conversation? It is rather, as Mark Twain might've put it, like the difference between “lightning bug” and “lightning.”

We also must consider who does the labeling. Does the research in question rely on having subjects self-identify their sexual orientation? We know all too well that not everyone does this in the same way or with the same criteria. Or has the researcher assigned the “heterosexual” (or “homosexual”) label to his subjects, and if so, on what basis? Researchers often identify subjects as heterosexuals merely because they are not identified otherwise, a sort of “innocent until proven guilty” approach. Or they may diagnose subjects' sexual orientations based on criteria that might or might not be linked to heterosexuality, for instance, assuming that any woman who has given birth to a child must be heterosexual. In his 1991 research into sexual difference in the region of the brain called the hypothalamus, neuroanatomist Simon LeVay classified his subjects' sexuality based on their cause of death. Subjects who had died of AIDS-related causes were counted as “homosexual” while the other subjects were assumed to be heterosexual. Numerous scientific critics slammed LeVay for “compiling inadequate sexual histories,” a professional way of saying that LeVay was assigning sexual orientation to subjects based on evidence that could not prove what he claimed it did.[
11
] But these well-justified criticisms did not make it into the mainstream media, where news of LeVay's “discovery” of “gay brains”—solidly refuted since, it should be noted—was making headlines, and LeVay's career.

Without a rock-solid standard definition, or at least a strict protocol for articulating definitions with respect to any particular research project or study, we do not actually know what lies under the hood of a scientific “heterosexual.” This makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to draw any scientifically meaningful conclusions from study to study.

Furthermore, as Dr. LeVay's example shows, an awful lot of doxa can hide in the assumptions that are made in the setting-up and conducting of scientific research. This does not mean that physical science is not a useful tool, or that it has nothing to tell us about “heterosexual.” What it does mean is that we have a long way to go before physical science is even sure what it's talking about when it talks about “heterosexual,” let alone before it has anything definitive to teach us about what that might be.

KNOWING SEX, KNOWING DOXA

Material and biological sciences simultaneously know a great deal about sex . . . and not very much about it at all. Material science is good at describing objects and phenomena that can be observed and measured. Biology is brilliant at documenting and describing physical actions that take place, and reasonably acute at figuring out the functions performed by those actions. This is why there is so much excellent scientific work about the biology, physiology, and anatomy of sex. Bodies and their workings are material objects, subject to consistent natural laws. Physical actions are interactions with the material world, with observable and documentable consequences.

What material and biological sciences are not so good at doing—for the very simple reason that it is not what they are set up to do—is documenting and explaining things that are not physically tangible. The physical and biological sciences can, for instance, explain how penises become erect. They can explain how vasodilation takes place and blood flow to the penis increases, how the spongy bodies in the penis fill with blood, what physics and hydraulics are involved in making the penis stiffen, and how blood is temporarily kept inside the penis so that the penis can remain erect. But no scientist can tell you whether that erect penis is gay or straight. An erection might be caused by a heterosexual desire or a homosexual desire or, for that matter, by the action of a drug. These things do not affect how erections happen or how they function. From the standpoint of the physical and biological sciences, one erect human penis is more or less interchangeable with the next.