You Are Who You Sleep With
SEXUALITIES, 2 May 2011
Today, people form identities based on sexual orientation, but it wasn’t always that way. Why is it so important now and why has contemporary research focused only on homosexuality?
Most of the conversations I had with researchers and academics about why we have a sexual orientation shifted almost immediately to the issue of homosexual preference. Eventually I became exasperated and asked one of the experts, “Why are people only talking to me about gays? What about heterosexuals – do we know the origins of their sexual orientation?”
Whether we do or not, the fact is that for many years no one took any interest in studying “regular” sexual orientation. The norm was always perceived as self-evident, so there was supposedly no more to say about it.
As a result, homosexuality was classified before heterosexuality – at the end of the 19th century – and since then, sexual orientation has been categorized and cataloged, at first stuck in the behavioral margins and later in the center.
The question of why human beings possess sexual orientation can be divided into two parts. The first is why each of us is inclined to prefer a particular gender, and the answer is a mix of psychology, biology and evolution. The second part of the question is more complex, and so is the answer: Why does this category exist at all? Why do we as a society classify sexual orientation, and who considers this so important?
It was certainly important for Karl-Maria Kertbeny (1824-1882 ), an Austro-Hungarian writer and journalist who experienced the national-liberation movement of Europe’s Spring of Nations. But he also saw the repressive side of his era, when a male friend of his who engaged in sexual relations with men killed himself.
Kertbeny set out to investigate the phenomenon and write about it; in the course of cataloging types of sexuality he coined the term “homosexual.”
“That was a historic watershed,” says Dr. Amit Kama, who teaches communications at Emek Yezreel College. “From that moment, people were categorized according to their sexual orientation. Until then, sexuality was not part of one’s identity. Men married women: there were no other options. Some of them might occasionally have sexual relations with another woman or another man, but that said nothing about their essence or their identity. It played no part in the realms of thought, psychology or sociology. But that was the turning point: subsequently, the entire 20th century was characterized by sexuality becoming an integral part of our identity. In our time, people cannot say they don’t have a sexual orientation.”
Sexuality as social control
“The very notion of sexuality as a distinct area of life is a new mode of thought, modern Western thought,” says Dr. Amalia Ziv, who teaches in the gender studies program at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Until the 19th century, the discourse about sexuality was grounded in thought about morality and was conducted in the spheres of religion or law.
“Sexuality was organized primarily through the institution of marriage,” Ziv notes, “and everything that happened outside marriage was considered either a transgression or of no importance. However, the 19th century saw a dramatic development: medicine annexed sexuality, which was now perceived in terms of health versus sickness, normality versus pathology.
“That became possible,” she continues, “because desire and the sexual drive entered the field of biology; anything that deviated from the natural order was considered pathological. It was only when people began to be categorized according to their desires that we started to talk about sexual orientation, based on the gender of the object of desire. Sexual orientation is not defined according to what you like to do, but with whom. After all, sexuality could have been categorized on the basis of other parameters.”
Ziv says politically, there is no clear beneficiary from categorizing sexuality this way. “The philosopher Michel Foucault maintains that categorizing people according to their sexuality is a technique of social control, which enables strong social forces to infiltrate our private body intimately,” he says. “It is also possible that as the religious and economic importance of the marriage institution declined, it became necessary to anchor the relationship between men and women in a different way: by defining heterosexuality as the norm, which brought about the appearance of homosexuality as its pathological ‘other.’ In any case, these are deep social processes and it is impossible to know what or who drives them.” Once the idea of sexual orientation was out there, research into it began to pick up. “The idea put forward by Kertbeny, Freud and others was to find the ‘sick people,'” Kama says. “The sexual orientation that was of interest to researchers, geneticists and physicians was that of homosexuality as a sickness. This was followed by an investigation of its roots, development and methods of curing it. The question of how sexual orientation is acquired has always been asked in reference to pathology. No research resources were invested in studying heterosexual orientation, just as no one ever asks model Yael Bar Zohar when she decided that she was heterosexual. It’s not interesting.”
Similarly, Dr. Danny Kaplan, the director of the male studies track in the Gender Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University and a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, agrees that the issue of sexual orientation has social, cultural and political implications. “It’s become a hot question in the past few years,” Kaplan says, but adds that in most cultures outside the West the topic has not been raised.
The origin of the question, he argues, lies in the Western culture of consumption.
“We are not dealing only with sexual orientation,” Kaplan says, “but with all the needs of the individual and with a consumer culture. Already in the 19th century people were cataloged according to their tastes. That was not necessarily consumer-related but that aspect was heightened along the way. It starts with what you like to do in bed and continues with what you like to buy for bed. The consumer culture amplified preferences generally, including sexual preferences. Why we have sexual preferences is a question about differences between people. Western culture and, if we take it to an extreme, capitalism, encourages differences between people.”
Genetic dead end
Still, before the question of sexual orientation began to be subjected to social and cultural analysis, it was a scientific question. “When we try to understand the question of sexual orientation,” Kaplan explains, “the evolutionary model tells us that heterosexuality served the survival of the human species. However, this is a theoretical model which cannot be proved, nor does it tell us why people are born with a desire to be attracted to an object from one gender or another, why people are attracted to manifestations of masculinity or femininity.”
Kama dismisses the approach based on nature and evolution as “old questions which we no longer encounter in today’s postmodern science.” People are “remote from early man, from nature,” he says. “We engage in so many activities without ever doubting them: We drive a car and drink Coke – what does that have to do with evolution? But when it comes to sexual orientation we say immediately that it’s nature.”
Kama is similarly hesitant to point to evolution as the reason for homosexual tendencies.
“If you were to ask Darwin, he would say that homosexuality is an evil that adversely affects the continuity of the race and will perish from the earth in a process of natural selection,” he says. “But it has not perished. I don’t like that answer, but it appears that homosexuality is ingrained in our nature and biology, because otherwise nature would have corrected it.”
In Kaplan’s view, science is on a dead-end road in its attempt to explain the sources of sexual orientation. “We do not have clear answers today,” he says.
Kama mostly agrees with Kaplan’s view, saying that geneticists and historians have been unable to forward any acceptable theories.
“Nowadays the question of how people cope with their sexual orientation is raised but not the question of its roots,” he says.
Still, the biological approach – despite the scorn heaped on it by anthropologists – has not yet had the last word. It is now thought that genetic and hormonal factors influence sexual orientation. In genetics, for example, studies of identical twins show that if one of them is homosexual there is a high probability that the other will also be gay. Other research suggests that sexual orientation is influenced by the hormonal environment of the fetus in the womb. Yet another study refers to the ratio between the length of the forefinger and the fourth finger: in men the fourth finger is longer, in women the two fingers are the same length. The ratio is influenced by the exposure of fetuses to the male hormone testosterone. A number of studies have shown that in homosexuals the ratio between the length of the two fingers is close to that in women.
“Other hormonal studies examine gender differences,” Kaplan says. “For example, a correlation exists between male hormones and an orientation to a certain type of memory, hyperactivity or a particular temperament. Different models have shown that male homosexuals more closely resemble women in these features. For example, in spatial orientation, in which boys are generally better than girls, a correlation has been found between male homosexuals and a feminine pattern of spatial orientation. A famous study in neuropsychology shows that certain ganglia in the brain, in the hypothalamus, which are related to sexuality, are larger in males than in females. The ganglia of homosexuals were found to be smaller, like in women. “Putting together the pieces of the puzzle, we get a model of early brain organization which influences gender differences and apparently also affects sexual orientation. There is a difficulty with this research direction, because it is perceived as bigoted, in the sense that it looks for biological brain differences between two sexes.”
From girl friend to girlfriend
Ziv also takes issue with the biological approach, pointing to the mobility of people’s sexual preferences.
“The moment we think about this subject from the cultural angle, biological research turns out to be very problematic,” she says. “Biological research is based on an assumption that every person possesses a sexual orientation, in the sense of being attracted only to men or only to women. But what if this attraction changes? Sexual desires are not stable. Biology has no answer for this. Biologists say that gays and lesbians are characterized by a different physiological structure of the brain, a different hormonal balance or a genetic difference; but that type of report cannot explain how sexual behavior and sexual desires changes in the course of life.”
Amir Rosenman, a social psychologist who has done research on identity and stigma, notes that in recent years a discussion has sprung up about whether there is a difference in how men and women express and relate to their sexual orientation.
“Lisa Diamond, a developmental psychologist at the University of Utah, has a thesis, backed up by research, holding that sexual orientation is more flexible in women,” Rosenman says. “She describes cases of women who were completely straight and lived their lives with a husband and children. But after they were helped by a close girl friend during a crisis the intimate feelings between them were transformed into sexual attraction. Such stories are less common among men, and male gays generally know that they are so inclined from an early age. I agree with this thesis and I know stories about women who felt good with a man – and then it changed. With men, even if they don’t come out of the closet until the age of 45, they will tell you that they loved men from an early age.” Rosenman points to evolution, albeit reluctantly, as a reason for women’s flexibility in sexual orientations. Then again, he says, “You can find an explanation for everything in evolutionary psychology.” “I am not looking for an explanation. I see that as a political danger. When we say about a certain phenomenon, ‘That is due to evolution, that is how nature works,’ it’s the modern equivalent of saying ‘God created.’ I find that uncomfortable ideologically. As far as I am concerned, explanations are on the margins.”
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