Straight (12 page)

This is something we often have a difficult time accepting when
it comes to human beings and human sexuality. Lurking deep in our doxa, and possibly quite a bit deeper than that, is the notion that aspects of who we are and what we have experienced will inevitably manifest themselves physically in the body. It is a conceit we are reared on: how many children's stories have evil characters who are hideous or deformed and good ones who are beautiful? We stigmatize the disabled, the deformed, and the just plain funny-looking on the basis of their bodies, assuming them to be stupid or incompetent.

We do this where sex is concerned, too. Even now, despite there being no proof for it whatsoever, many people are still profoundly attached to the idea that having penetrative sex for the first time permanently changes a woman's body, that you can tell that a woman is no longer a virgin by the width of her hips or the way she walks.[
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But we non-scientific laypeople are not the only ones guilty of assuming that when it comes to who we are or what we have experienced sexually, the body will out. Physical and biological scientists who look for evidence of distinctive “gay” bodies—whether in terms of genes or hormones or brains or gross anatomical features like fingers or genitals—are working from the same principle. In order to look for evidence of a physically or biologically distinctive “gay” body, an additional assumption is necessary: that there is also a distinctive “non-gay” body from which to draw comparisons.

This line of thinking has an exceptionally long history. Both the ancient Romans and nineteenth-century Italian neurologist Paolo Montegazza, apparently independently of one another, proposed that “true” homosexual males (men who took on the receptive role with other men) could be explained by “an anatomical anomaly that sometimes leads the final branches of the [genital] nerves to the rectum; therefore its stimulation causes for the passives that genital excitement that in ordinary cases can be caused only through the genitals.”[
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] No such bodily anomaly has ever been documented. But the claim that “normal” men's nervous systems arranged themselves properly in the penis, while abnormal men's nerves arranged themselves in such a way that the anus became like the vagina—built to be penetrated, as it were—had a tempting psychological logic. The possibility that the sensory nerves normally present in the anus, rectum, and the prostate might be capable of transmitting pleasurable sensation apparently
did not occur to Montegazza. Along similar lines, historian of homosexuality Gert Hekma has found early nineteenth-century reports by Dutch physicians claiming that men who engaged in anal intercourse had anuses that bordered on the vaginal, funnel-shaped and bordered by delicate, hairless, skin analogous to the labia minora in women. Heterosexual men, on the other hand, were said to have “normal” anuses.

Such comparison tactics have not been limited to the territory below the belt. Pioneering Berlin sexologist and homosexual rights defender Magnus Hirschfeld, eager to prove a biological basis to homosexuality in the hopes that it could be used to create a legal defense, surveyed features like voice, musculature, height, weight, and so on in hundreds of subjects to try to find evidence of biological differences between male homosexual and heterosexual bodies. The physical traits Hirschfeld and his followers recorded, however, were not assessed in terms of ounces, megahertz, degrees of inclination, or thickness of dermal fold, but on “direct impressionistic observations,” meaning whatever sort of impression the researcher had of the subject upon observing him directly. The angles at which subjects carried their arms, the distribution of fat on their bodies, the pitches of their voices, and many other characteristics were assessed and labeled not as a series of measurements in degrees or inches or megahertz, which would have been good scientific practice, but according to whether they struck the researcher's sensibilities as being masculine or feminine.[
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] Hirschfield's researchers were not the only ones to attempt this sort of research. Nor were they the only ones to find that their data, even with the bias they introduced to it themselves, did not support clear conclusions. Inevitably such studies produced nothing in more copious quantity than evidence that there were homosexuals with “masculine” characteristics and heterosexuals with “feminine” ones. This was variously ignored, massaged out of the statistics, or simply declared irrelevant.

This is the sort of thing that happens when doxa meets science. There is nothing inherently unscientific about the intersection of doxa—our beliefs about the world—and science. Indeed, the scientific process provides a genuinely useful and exceptionally sensible method for testing doxa and determining whether what we believe
to be true about the observable and quantifiable world is indeed so. There is nothing unscientific about designing experiments to test the doxic belief that if a person is sexually unorthodox or different, this difference will also exist in the person's physical body. What is unscientific is doing such experimentation and then being unwilling to accept results that did not turn out the way you thought they would . . . or wanted them to. If you set out to test the doxa that human behavioral variation manifests itself in the physical body, two of the possible outcomes of such testing are that it does not at all, or that it does not do so predictably or reliably. In science, a negative result is just as scientific, and just as meaningful, as a positive result.

The tendency for scientists to use physical and biological science to test principles derived from doxa or belief is, again, not inherently unscientific. The tricky bit lies in how aware scientists are of the doxa that influences their work. For instance, ideally Magnus Hirschfeld would have been aware that he was assuming that heterosexual bodies manifested a distinctive set of gendered characteristics (to which the gendered characteristics of homosexual bodies could be compared). He would have realized that this was not an assumption he could simply make, as a scientist, because it made intuitive sense to him as a human being. Without actual observation and measurement of the characteristics of heterosexual bodies, he could not actually say whether they
did
manifest a distinctive set of gendered traits. Scientifically speaking, Hirschfeld failed to adequately characterize his control because doxa led him to believe that he already knew everything he needed to know. As it turned out, he did not, and what his experiments proved without a shadow of a doubt as a result is that in the absence of an adequately characterized control, it is difficult if not impossible to make meaningful comparisons.

 

As much depends on whether the tools the scientists choose to use are appropriate for and capable of testing the things the scientists want to test. Returning to Hirschfeld, we have already noted that he chose to use “direct impressionistic observations” rather than various standardized units of measurement. This, in large and unambiguous form,
is doxa showing up again: another way of saying “direct impressionistic observation” is
I know it when I see it.
One of the reasons that scientists generally choose to use instruments rather than their own senses, and standardized units of measurement rather than descriptive characterizations, is to eliminate this inbuilt potential for human biases to prejudice data.

The last piece of the puzzle is whether the data scientists are capable of gathering is actually adequate to answer the questions the scientists are trying to ask. Because doxa is in many ways a shorthand that we use for making sense of how the world works, it often blinds us to how complicated some things really are. We are accustomed to an “everyone knows” ideology of sexuality that is obvious and clear-cut: male or female, straight or gay, kinky or vanilla, sick or healthy. We are similarly used to an “everyone knows” thinking about bodies as being essentially mechanical collections of individual, well-understood components starting with DNA. The temptation is to assume that the relationship between the body and sexuality must be straightforward and uncomplicated. After all, it doesn't
feel
complicated when we experience it. This, as we shall see, has proven to be a particularly problematic assumption, sending us deeper and deeper into ever more specialized and detailed aspects of the body to try to tease out how—and indeed whether—the physical, material body is connected to the behaviors and experiences of sexuality.

THE ESSENTIAL INVERT

There are few better demonstrations of the tensions between sex doxa and sex science than the biomedical approach to homosexuality known as “sexual inversion.” For most of human history, little distinction has been made between biological sex and gender. The idea of a sex “essence,” some mysterious aspect of biological sex that creates the gendered persona, remains common. Karl Ulrichs's theory of “inversion” is the basis of this concept's modern incarnation: his contention was that homosexual men were, in a sense, hermaphrodites; biological males with a female “essence,” a psyche or soul that was inherently feminine. In various ways and to various degrees, this idea that homosexuality and bisexuality are caused by an “inversion” of a gendered “essence” that is either psychological or biological remains pervasive,
and at the center of much current research into sexual orientation.

This is important to a history of heterosexuality because heterosexuality is just as implicated in the idea of sexual inversion as homosexuality. If sexuality is in fact a matter of whether all the inherent sexed aspects or qualities of a human being are properly matched according to type, then this is just as relevant in terms of what makes someone a heterosexual as it is in terms of what makes someone not a heterosexual.

The hypothesis is straightforward. For over a hundred years now, scientists have looked for biological evidence of sexual inversion on multiple fronts and have found no conclusive evidence that it exists.

The easiest, and hence both the earliest and commonest, way to search for proof of sexual inversion has involved that fine old Victorian hobby, hunting for evidence of mismatches between biology and gender. Feminized maleness, historically, created the most pressing sense of crisis.[
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] The word “feminism,” in fact, originated not to describe a pro-female sociopolitical movement but as a quasimedical term meaning “feminization.” It shows up in French sources from the 1870s in which neurasthenia and homosexuality are cited as consequences of a man's unfortunate
féminisme.
Homosexual men have been stereotyped as both physically and mentally feminine, limpwristed, “pretty,” and prone to girly displays of high emotion and interest in the decorative arts, possibly simultaneously. As recently as 1995, British psychiatrist and sexologist Richard Green, in discussing the links he believes to exist between gender identity and homosexuality, famously quipped, “Barbie doll at five, sex with men at twenty-five.”[
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This all fits in nicely with the doxa of the sex and gender binary we inherited from our Enlightenment and Victorian ancestors, but what is actually demonstrated by the current state of play in scientific research is not so cut and dried.

Science seems to be of two minds about whether biology is likely to hold evidence of orientational destiny. On the one hand, no reputable scientist today will argue, for instance, that heterosexual men are more virile and hairier than their gay brothers, or that lesbian women are by nature more muscular and sexually aggressive than straight women, although at one point both these notions were accepted as true. Researchers freely acknowledge that there is an extensive laundry
list of physical and behavioral traits that were once believed to be linked to sexual orientation but that have been proven not to be. At the same time, they continue to seek evidence for a distinctive “homosexual body” that deviates somehow from the “normal” body that heterosexuals are still presumed, yet still not in fact proven, to possess. Within just the last ten years, genes, brains, hormones, and even bits like fingers, ears, and hair have all come under the scrutiny of scientists searching for some sort of bodily telltale of sexual orientation.

This search for distinctive evidence of sexual orientation in the body itself has followed a telling—and scientifically sensible—pattern. Whenever one part of the body or aspect of physical function fails to provide a telltale diagnostic, the scientists look someplace else. When appearance, gross external anatomy, and characteristics like voices failed to produce the desired evidence, as they did quite early on, scientists began to turn their gaze inward. Aided by advances in chemistry, microscopy, surgery, and ever more specialized tools and technologies, biomedical scientists have proceeded to look at ever smaller and ever more deeply internal parts of the body.

Whether or not this will succeed in revealing any differences between gay bodies and straight bodies remains to be seen. One thing it definitely does succeed at doing, however, is making it much more difficult for laypeople to evaluate the validity of scientific claims made about the relationship between the body and sexuality. How many people who aren't neurologists are sufficiently aware of what a hypothalamus even is to be able to guess whether someone who tells us that there is a distinctively “gay” hypothalamus is likely to be right or wrong? We certainly do not have any sense of our own hypothalamus, or any conscious awareness of it; its influences upon us are silent and unseen, and essentially irrelevant to our workaday sense of self. As scientists have taken the search for the distinctively gay body to these tiny, unfamiliar, and inaccessible arenas, the public has had little choice but to trust these very privileged and frankly esoteric viewpoints. We have sufficient experience as body experts to be able to question whether a scientist who claims that all lesbians have excessive facial hair is making an accurate statement. When it comes to the interior of the brain, or the genome, or the endocrine system, on the other hand, we are much more likely to trust what we are told. We
simply don't have the experience to argue.