Can women truly become lesbian by choice?

Great Debates
21

On the one hand (so to speak)…

The hand of another person could be stimulating you, the nerve endings reacting to the friction, and if it were in the dark in a writhing mass of people, you might not even know the sex of the person operating it. We all have the capacity, under some circumstance, to have erotic experiences with persons of the same sex, the opposite sex, and perhaps sexes yet to be discovered.

And as a consequence of that, then yes, people being what they are, it is possible for a person to choose on the basis of social politics to experience their orgasms with one sex or the other. Joanna Russ, a feminist / science-fiction author who wrote quite a bit in the 70s, was rather explicit on this point:

(from The Female Man)

Does the person making such a social-politically-based decision “truly become lesbian” (or gay, or straight, or whatever), though? Or, to unpack some of our modern cultural sexual assumptions back out of that suitcase, let’s ask: Does such a person still lust for a sex other than the one they’ve chosen to restrict their erotic encounters to? And does such a person enjoy sex less if they have chosen to pursue erotic encounters with a sex to which they are not natively & directly sexually attracted?

Joanna Russ, in the quoted excerpts above, is easy to read as a strong “yes” on the first part, but an unclear response on the second. “Less” than what? Less than they would enjoy a sexual liaison with the sex to which they are more viscerally attracted under ideal conditions, conditions where the social-political reasons for their choice would not apply? Or less than the extent to which they can actually experience enjoyable sex with people of that sex, with all the social baggage and mental baggage and political and historical baggage that comes with it?

If you tend to have a lot of orgasms in a green room with Bach playing, you might begin to have Pavlovian erogenous responses to being in a green room with Bach playing; so by the same logic, perhaps if you have orgasms sufficiently often with a sex you were not originally attracted to, you could start to have an erogenous response to the presence of that sex “as a situation”, even if you were no more indigenously attracted to that than you are to green rooms or the sound of Bach.

22

Another thing to consider is that the concept of a sexual orientation is a fairly new and in many cases dangerous thing. In the past, there were homosexual acts, not homosexual people, and as a result people were not forced to categorize themselves as a certain orientation just because of a few same-sex experiences or shift their entire identity because they now choose sex acts from the other side of the salad bar. Looked at this way, the woman is not a straight woman changing teams, but a woman who chose to participate in sex acts with men but now chooses to participate in sex acts with women. She hasn’t changed, just her actions.

Can you tell I’m all for the dismantling of the concept of orientation?

23

:dubious:

You do see the little icons to the right when you’re typing in a response, right?

24

I have read about studies that suggest this to be true: that it is far less common for men to be truly bisexual than for women. (I don’t remember where I read this, but I do remember that the studies were tentative and so far inconclusive.)

25

IMO, by no means scientific, but are pretty solid observations I’ve had so far.

First off, I’ve had a few “straight” female friends decide that because they’ve been with lousy men, then they were going to try women. INVARIABLY they pick the same kind of personality in their female partner that they ended up disliking in their male partners. Being with a woman is certainly no guarantee that you won’t be treated badly. Most of them, after going through that, were smart enough to realize the problem was who they were attracted to, not gender (some weren’t, but that’s another story). Some still called themselves bisexual after the experience (cf Holly Near), but most just said “oh, whatever. Labels suck.”

Second, being in San Francisco I’ve gotten to meet a huge number of people where these labels just don’t fit, and there’s a host of really interesting labels that have been invented: “homo-curious.” “Bio-queens & bio-kings.” “heteroflexible.” “Plays bi, loves homo.” And my favorite, the analogue of MTF “Chicks with dicks”-- “FTM manginas.” All this sexual & gender exploration is done by both men and women of all kinds of orientations, so who knows what kind of world it would be if sexuality wasn’t inherently defined by gender, and no one made judgements about anyone’s preferences? If SF is any indication, it’d be a helluva lot more fun.

26

Hang on just a tick though. For the benefit of the audience, at age 13 didn’t you identify as straight male? :confused:

27

I thought Kinsey had been pretty thoroughly discredited. For example, he would discard data, without statistical or scientific reasons.

As far as Stark Raving’s, “But isn’t the current scientific opinion that the brain is sexed in the womb?”, the answer is no. As of a couple of years ago at least, there is no scientific evidence either way. Scientific American ran a pro/con article, must be close to a decade ago, in which that was pointed out. The one researcher, with definite findings I’ve read about since, was busted for fraud. As Cecil pointed out in today’s article, it really isn’t clear.

Back in the 70’s, social opinion was that it is a choice. (At one of my summer jobs, one guy hit on me, after telling me he was gay because he was too big for women. Not the way to seduce a straight guy. Or at least me.) Now, it is the other way. One problem, I think, is equating “no choice” with “in the womb” with genetic. Hell, the gender of some species is determined by water temperature, who knows how humans work. I too have heard lines of Anaamika’s - from people such as a woman about to go to her childhood best friend’s marriage to anothe woman. The countervailing stories for guys seem to run along the lines of being victims of abuse as boys. It would be interesting to know what the statistical differences are between such populations as the general population, but without really reliable statistics for the general population, I suppose the differences would be meaningless.

I personally think that there are as many reasons for orientation as their are people. I’m also think that anyone willing to experiment sexually will probably repeat the experience. There is nothing like sex for providing positive feedback.

28

AHunter3, so if sexual orientation can be switched one way or the other just by ideology, then do you find plausible the claims of those Christian ministries like Exodus that say they make queers straight?

I don’t.

29

People identified me that way. I never felt it fit me. It took me a very long time to learn to assert what I want to do with my life, not what others demand.

30

No, we’re talking about personal viewpoints switching, not from being forced. Outside influences certainly contribute, but very few humans like being forced to do everything.

I don’t really believe it’s one way or the other. My sexuality has gone through changes as I’ve matured; hasn’t everyone?

I’m really believing it’s more like the Kinsey scale.

31

Yeah, what Anaamika said. Also, I was kind of stepping outside of our everyday notions of “sexual preference” in my post above, so I don’t think it smoothly reads back into it. A closer approximation would probably be “You can pursue a lifestyle / behavior-pattern that contradicts rather than affirms who you are innately attracted to; some people do this for social-political reasons, including ideological”. As to whether that “turn you straight” (or gay or whatever), or instead means you have chosen “the closet” – I was not making that call.

32

I don’t think anyone can “become gay.” I do think people can explore that “middle ground” area of their psyche and sexuality, and become comfortable with a behavior that is less threatening or painful or whatever. It’s easier for women to exhibit homosexual behavior in this country than it is for men. It just doesn’t raise the ick factor the way man-on-man sex does.

I also think that it’s much easier for women to express any kind of affection. Men have a tough expectation to live up to. Women are supposed to be supportive and nurturing to just about everyone on the planet. Weird society we live in.

33

Let’s do a thought experiment.

  1. Posit that both men’s and women’s sexual orientations are more or less innate (genetic, or determined by some ridiculously young age).

  2. Posit also that people’s sexual orientations are distributed along a range with fully hetero at one end, and completely queer at the other. (I’ll make no assumption as to what the distribution is, but there’s certainly more reason to assume that it’s not a flat (equiprobable) distribution, or a bell curve with the mean in the dead center. but most likely a distribution whose mean is nearer the straight end.)

3A) Now posit that you’re in a society that strongly disapproves of homosexuality. What’s going to happen? Wherever you are on the continuum, you’re going to try to live straight if you possibly can, and live gay only if you find trying to live straight to be intolerable. What’s going to happen in terms of lifestyles? You’re going to get a large cluster of people living straight, and a much smaller cluster living gay.

If the scale runs from 0 = totally straight to 10 = totally gay, then most of those 7s and 8s are going to try to be straight. Hell, a lot of those 9s and 10s are too.

3B) Somewhat ease that societal disapproval. What’s going to happen? More of those 7s and 8s are going to live gay or bi, and more of those 2s-6s are going to try bi too.

3C) Suppose we ease that societal disapproval more for women, than for men. What happens then? Yeah, a lot more young women checking out their bi sides than men.

  1. Let’s also toss in the reality that we guys mature socially a bit more slowly than girls do while growing up, and that groups of boys and young men tend to be more immature and often jerkish than they are as individuals. And note that through the end of college, guys tend to be around a lot of guys their own age.

If you’re a college-age woman who’s a 2 or 3 on that scale, and your opposite-sex dating opportunities include far too many drunken frat boys, think you might be more inclined than otherwise to check out your bi side? Of course.

And when such a woman graduates from college, and isaround a mix of men your age and older, but even the men her age are starting to be socialized by the mores of the working world, rather than those of school-age young men with minimal responsibilities, might one’s bi side be of less interest, given the improvement of the male dating pool? ISTM that that would make sense.

That’s my thought experiment, FWIW. It seems to explain things pretty well to me, but YMMV.

34

I think this one would do well as a debate.

Moved from IMHO to GD.

35

Anybody have some solid cites for bonobo sexuality?

Here’s what I found on a quick pass:

http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ProduktNr=223842&Ausgabe=230613&ArtikelNr=82452&filename=82452.pdf

http://www.primatesworld.com/BonobosLikeHumans.html

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?id=2758&type=book&cn=10 (this is a review of a book about the evolution of the female orgasm. The reviewer feels the book suffers from the absence of sufficient exploration of bonobos)

I have a family friend who is a rather esteemed Primatologist. I’ve been meaning to pick his brain regarding bonobo research for some time. I’m sure he can point me toward some great cites.

Anyway…

I think humans have an innate capacity for the “sliding scale” sexuality as davenportranger reffered to it. I also think there are a plethora of variables that influence that scale. Some are genetic. Some are biochemical. Some are social. Some are hormonal. Some are psychological. Some of these variables are influential at very specific times (ie in utero), while others fluctuate throughout our lives, either randomly (ie whether or not we encounter sexual trauma) or as part of a more predictable model (ie hormone levels changing with age).

Sexual behavior is hugely complex, and any understanding of it is also going to be complex. Sound bytes, rigid dichotomies, sweeping generalizations…such things don’t often contribute much complexity.

36

Only if she’s really, really, smart…

I confess to at least slight *smugity in pointing out that the great tragedy stalking straight women and gay men is that they are stuck choosing their life partners from among men…

When you contemplate the variety of toys available for women (toys which take up where men leave off, as it were
with impossible bends not to mention hi-g force acceleration) it is a miracle that any women insist on flesh-and-blood dicks (PRAISE JESUS!!!)
*grammarians, save your outrage–I knhw there is no such word, and that the “right” word is smugness, but it’s not as good a fit as “smugity”. Colbert, eat your heart out…)

37

that bonobo whit is mind blowing–I didn’t realize that they were conflated with chimps till the1930’s.

The face to face coital capacity is a HUGE eveolutionary marker, because it involves (needless to say) substantial rearrangement of female 'plumbing.

38

Loftis (on the substantive merits) has his head stuck up his ass looking for stars.

Women INVENTTED recreational sex–in that regard bonobos are our ONL:Y mammalian (or primate, for that matter) companions.

39

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about bonobos. Yes, they engage in an astoshing amount of sexual activities with members of the same sex. While this is fairly common in the aminal kingdom, bonobos seem to have developed it to a high art. But… it’s unlcear if this is due to “sexual attraction” or if it is simply using sex as a way of maintaining social cohesion. I think you’ll find most primatologist think it is the latter. AFAIK, there hasn’t been any documentation of bonobos who engage exclusively in same sex activity.

Frans de Waal is probably the leading expert on bonobos. Any of his books would make excellent reading. Although it’s not entirely about bonobos, I’d recommend his most recent book, if you’re interested in the subject: Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. I read it a few months ago, and found it to be fascinating.

40

“Sexual attraction” isn’t the only factor influencing or leading to human sexual behavior either. Don’t you think it is fair to say that a significant amount of human sexual behavior also takes place as a way of maintaining social cohesion, and not necessarily due to attraction?

An argument can be made that people more attracted to members of the same sex, and yet participate in heterosexual sex, have done so or are doing so to maintain social cohesion. The same could be said for cultural/social traditions such as arranged marriages or basically any time anyone has had sex with someone else because it was what was socially expected.

I’m not advocating the perspective that humans are exactly like bonobos when it comes to sex, but I do personally think that, even in our admittedly limited understanding of their sexual behavior, in many ways it appears to be a more realistic model for human sexuality than many of the models that are currently advanced by our society, especially many of the models with religious origins.

Thanks for the suggested reading. I’m certainly interested in giving it a look.