Straight (26 page)

Women continue to be bombarded with exhortations to be, or become, more optimally responsive to penetrative vaginal sex. For a price, plastic surgeons will remodel a woman's vulva and vagina in a process its practitioners call “vaginal rejuvenation,” with the object of rearranging tissues not only to tighten the vagina for the sake of male pleasure, but so that the thrusts of a penis create more collateral friction between clitoris and clitoral hood, and therefore in theory more female orgasms. One Los Angeles specialist has even invented a dubious procedure called “G-spot Amplification,” injecting collagen into the vaginal wall structure known as the Grafenburg or G-spot on the theory that a bigger G-spot means greater arousal during penetration.[
29
] For men, Viagra and its relatives reinforce the hoary old shibboleth that all you need for successful sex—the kind that makes you
burst into song with your buddies and makes your wife swoon—is a rock-hard penis to penetrate your partner with. Masters and Johnson may have killed the Freudian myth of the vaginal orgasm, but it seems no one has yet managed to drive a stake through its heart.

The more things change, it seems, the more things stay the same. As I write these words, the German pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim is doing advanced testing of a drug with the uncomely name of Flibanserin, which it claims can help to alleviate the symptoms of a “disorder” of female sexuality called Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD). Though the company's testing focuses on what it calls “Satisfying Sexual Events” (or SSE, in the acronymphomaniac parlance of Big Pharma), the basic dynamic is the same as the one that put countless Atomic Age wives on the analyst's couch. Women must be heterosexual in the right ways, in the right amounts, and they must experience the right degree and type of pleasure, or there is something the matter with them that demands professional treatment. This so-called “female Viagra,” will, in theory, alter brain chemistry to make sure that women want what they're supposed to want, that they enjoy what they're supposed to enjoy, that they are better adjusted to the sexual demands of their men and their culture.[
30
] But as with Viagra itself, what does it mean when sexual—and specifically heterosexual—pleasure comes courtesy of a pill?

One thing it means is that we have not yet resolved the uneasy relationship between society and libido that Freud identified a hundred years ago. As Freud insightfully noted, the libido is a strange attractor, chaotic and amorphous, and its free reign was, and still is, antithetical to the existence of Western society as we know it. Freud claimed that sexual repression was what channeled the unruly energies of libido into useful paths, making it the engine that literally drove—and peopled, and built, and painted, and wrote, and farmed—the civilized world. But since approximately the time of Freud, the libido has made increasing claims to independence, not least, as Jonathan Ned Katz points out, through the very word and concept of “heterosexual” and its ability to give medical and intellectual legitimacy to middle-class desire.[
31
] The proof of concept of this new legitimization of a libido-driven pleasure ethic for male/female sex was arguably the Sexual Revolution. Its success is attested to not just in the myriad books
devoted to having more and better and longer and easier orgasms, but in the most mainstream of pop culture, from the famous Katz's Deli fake-orgasm scene in
When Harry Met Sally
to the covers on the headlines of a good two-thirds of the women's magazines on the racks at any North American supermarket.

But old habits, and old doxa, endure. It is not surprising that our present landscape of heterosexual pleasure is a mixed bag of libidinous experiment and anxious rules-lawyering: the border between freedom and control is an uneasy, highly political place. We want women to be secure enough in the pursuit of their own pleasure to pick out the vibrators of their choice in friendly, feminist-owned sex shops, but we don't want them to prefer vibrators to men. We want men to be virile, experienced, and highly sexually skilled, but not to prioritize sex over love or to refuse marriage and fatherhood. We are anxious to experience sexual pleasure and plenty of it, but only if it happens to the right people, at the right ages, in the right combinations. What it seems we really want is a heterosexuality in which we can enjoy all the thrills of riding the tiger of the libido while simultaneously being kept safe from its teeth and claws. It is a goal as idealistic as the creation of a right to the pursuit of happiness. It may, in fact, be an outgrowth of the very the same thing.

The scene: Another doctor's office, and a man with a framed Johns Hopkins diploma hanging on the wall behind him is looking at me with an expression of irritable confusion. It's not my straightforward and minor health problem that has him bothered; it's the fact that I've just corrected his pronoun use.

“ ‘He,' not ‘she,'” I say. “My partner is male-identified.”

He thrusts a pen into the pocket of his white lab coat and shakes his head. “Then why do you use the word ‘partner'? Everyone knows that ‘partner' means ‘same-sex partner.' You should say ‘husband,' or ‘boyfriend.' Just saying ‘partner' like that is misleading.”

Later on in the elevator, prescription in hand, I think back on the interaction. I've run into this assumption many times, that my using “partner” is code for “lesbian.” But there's something about the doctor's use of the word “misleading” that grates. Had he said that my referring to my “partner” was confusing or unclear, I don't think it would have bothered me. But his use of the word “misleading” felt like an accusation. Rattled by being told that his assumptions were incorrect, he turned the tables by implying that I was lying, or at the very least breaking some unwritten rule.

And in a way, he was right. I had broken the rules, but not by using the word “partner” to describe the person who has been, in Auden's words, “my North, my South, my East and West/My working
week and my Sunday rest” for nearly a decade and a half. Where I broke the rules was by correcting the doctor's assumption that I was referring to another woman, thus revealing something genuinely disturbing by the lights of our sexuality doxa: we can't always accurately guess another person's sexual orientation. My doctor
had,
I finally realized, been misled. But not by me. He was the dupe of doxa, betrayed by what he believed was true about the language of sexual orientation.

The simple fact is that no sexuality is as simple as my doctor wanted to make it. Neither is the language we use to talk about it. As Karl Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kertbeny were well aware, sexuality is a complicated alchemy that mixes biology, gender relations, hierarchy, resources, and power. “Heterosexual” and “homosexual” were, on one level, nothing more than a smart man's attempt to use language to redefine the terms of a particularly nasty game of Us vs. Them.

Despite it, the Us vs. Them prevailed. But black-and-white approaches have a hard time staying pristine in a world that features not just the proverbial thousand shades of grey, but the full Pantone range of living and luminous color. In the past century or so, since the notion of the “heterosexual” emerged into the mainstream of Western culture and became an entrenched part of doxa, there has been a constant struggle to maintain this sense of black-or-whiteness, this convenient fiction that human beings, by their very sexual natures, divide themselves neatly into two clear and distinct sexual camps.

It is a tricky and profound struggle. The ideology of the “heterosexual” is rooted in a fairly venerable vision of human society and the human animal. As we have seen throughout these pages, heterosexuality as a concept was born to serve a particular culture at a particular time. In the milieu into which “heterosexual” emerged, Christianity still formally controlled much of the social rule-making; gender roles were considered distinct and immutable; gender itself was seen as being an inextricable component of biological sex; and the idea that men and male priorities should run the world was just beginning to be meaningfully challenged. “Heterosexual” was coined for a world in which the ideal of economically and socially viable adulthood meant marriage, children, and middle-class domestic respectability. It was a society that was fairly comfortable with hierarchy, where political and social egalitarianism had become aspirational ideals but were by no means everyday practices.

“Heterosexual” also came into being at the same moment when the underpinnings of that culture were beginning to crack under stress. Protestantism, industrialization, urbanization, abolition, colonialism, capitalism, and the rise of science as a source of wide authority all played a part, as did the pressures of egalitarian and human rights philosophies. The notion of individual human happiness began to become a recognized cultural currency, with far-reaching, fundamentally revolutionary consequences.

But massive, cultural-bedrock power structures do not simply roll over when they encounter friction. Nor do they humbly and proactively offer to give up control if it would better serve current realities. Rather, they continue to assert their power as long as possible, using a wide variety of tools that very much includes assimilation. Like the fictional Borg of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, which assimilated the individuals and species it encountered into its own vast collective, hive-mind entity, heterosexuality often attempts to cope with disruptive influences by “adding their distinctiveness to our own.” The more numerous the practices and customs encompassed by the normative authority of “heterosexual,” the broader the regulatory reach of heterosexuality doxa. But assimilation has its limits. As sociologist and feminist theorist Stevi Jackson has put it, the maintenance of a particular doxa or scheme of sexuality is “not just a question of the maintenance of the heterosexual/homosexual binary, but of the multitude of desires and practices that exist on both sides of that divide.”[
1
]

In historical hindsight, we have been able to watch “heterosexual” expand to include, however haltingly, things like contraception, divorce, women's economic autonomy, and the prioritization of orgasm over reproduction. But no entity can engulf and digest everything that is thrown at it without eventually becoming something else entirely. Categories are meaningful because they are bounded. When those boundaries become too thinly stretched—or too easily permeable, or both—the categories themselves start to lose their meaning.

This may already be starting to happen to the category of heterosexuality. The landscape of sex and gender, so central to the hetero/homo scheme, has become increasingly complex and sophisticated, thanks both to advances in biomedical technology and to a growing, and increasingly visible, transgender and transsexual culture. Options for acquiring wealth, parenting children, and for forming (and indeed
dissolving and reforming) families have all undergone dramatic change that enables many options beyond the historical heterosexual nuclear-family norm. By putting a premium on psychological and physical satisfaction, we have made space to calculate the worth of sexual practices in totally nonreproductive terms: penis-in-vagina intercourse becomes only as worthwhile as it is pleasurable. And when female orgasm is made a major part of that calculus, penis-in-vagina intercourse often does not compare well to alternatives. Add to this the development of a robust queer culture and related changes in our doxa of how sexuality and sexual orientation work, and “heterosexual” becomes less and less inevitable, more vulnerable.

If the sheer weight of culture and history continues to give “heterosexual” the feel of a monolith, it is surely a monolith that has been suffering the effects of some very heavy weather. If we are to make any guesses about what the future of heterosexuality holds—and certainly if I am going to answer the question of how I might best characterize my own romantic and domestic partnership—we have to consider the impact of all these things on the nature and the future of “heterosexual.”

THE WIDE STANCE

When he was arrested for lewd conduct in a men's bathroom in the Minneapolis airport in June 2007, then-senator Larry Craig, a Republican from Idaho, reportedly defended himself against charges that he had touched the foot of an undercover officer in a neighboring bathroom stall with his own by saying that he had a “wide stance” when going to the bathroom. As Craig, a hard-line social conservative with a reputation for voting against LGBT rights issues, tried ineffectually to defend himself against charges that he was secretly gay, the “wide stance” phrase rapidly became a catchphrase to use to refer to a closeted queer.

The phrase is more than apt. Craig is only one of a sizeable number of socially conservative right-wing American politicians and religious figures to have been caught up in same-sex sexual scandal in recent years.[
2
] Like almost all of the others—California state senator Roy Ashburn being a notable exception—Craig vociferously maintained not only that he was innocent of the crime of which he was
accused (he pled guilty, then tried to retract the plea), but that he was innocent of the larger “crime” of being gay.

In a sense, he was correct. Whatever Larry Craig did or intended to do in that Minnesota bathroom, whether or not any of the several men who came forth to assert that they had had sex with Craig were telling the truth, and whatever same-sex desires might or might not have ever lurked in the former senator's thoughts really don't matter. Insofar as our modern doxa of sexual orientation involves, according to the American Psychological Association, “a person's sense of identity based on [emotional/romantic/sexual] attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions,” Larry Craig was incontrovertibly
not
gay.[
3
] What Craig was, metaphorically speaking if not literally, was a man with a wide stance. Like many other men have done throughout history, he straddled the border of what was permissible for a man in a position of power, with every expectation that his power, position, and privilege would insulate him from criticism.