Straight (9 page)

Fascinatingly, though, by the time Peraldus was writing in the early thirteenth century, the Church was labeling as
contra naturam
even some sexual activity that would have seemed, on the surface, to play by the potentially reproductive rules. Historian Ruth Mazo Karras points out that “against nature” was openly used to condemn behaviors that are clearly
not
contrary to nature, notably including rear-entry vaginal penetration. Any medieval man or woman would have been well aware that there was nothing unnatural whatsoever about penis-in-vagina intercourse in this posture, having seen animals do it. Yet it, along with any position other than what later became known as the “missionary,” was decried as being “against nature in terms of the manner.” The Church wanted, and indeed insisted upon, a version of what was “natural” that was identical to the doxa the Church endorsed. What churchmen were willing to condone on the basis of its being “natural” was a pretty severely edited version of actual nature.

Such opportunistic and specific embraces of “nature” are common . . . and telling. When, for instance, psychotherapist Richard Cohen advocated “reparative therapy”[
12
] in 2000 to a group called “Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays,” he claimed that “there is no scientific data that substantiates a genetic or biologic basis for same-sex attraction.” (Cohen's claim is correct as far as it goes. However, as we shall see in the next chapter, there is no scientific data that substantiates a genetic or biologic basis for sexual orientation, period.) Only willful human perversity, he implied, could explain the existence of something that is not biologically predestined.[
13
] On the flip side, it has been strongly suggested in many quarters, not least the august pages of
National Geographic,
that same-sex sexual relationships among animals provide a legitimating natural origin, and possibly even evidence
of a natural purpose, for same-sex sexuality among human beings. As University of Liverpool evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar put it, “Anything that happens in other primates, and particularly other apes, is likely to have strong evolutionary continuity with what happens in humans.”[
14
]

The fact that opposing viewpoints can both lay claim to natural support for their views on human sexuality should come as no surprise. Nature is vast and contains multitudes. The only genuinely consistent aspect of the claims we make about the relationship between what happens in nature and our beliefs in terms of what should happen in human sexuality is that human beings are the ones making the claims.

We would do well to consider the source. It is not nature that is so keen to tell us what is true or right or legitimate in terms of human sexuality. “What exists in nature,” after all, encompasses an extraordinary variety of sexual activities, routinely including polygamy, polyandry, gang rape, incest, cannibalizing one's mates, and the injection of sperm packets (spermatophores) into a mate's bodily flesh.[
15
] It's often rather horrifying by human standards, but that's precisely the point: nature isn't so choosy as we are. When human beings cherry-pick examples of sexual behavior in nature to buttress their own beliefs about the way sexuality is or should be among humans, it is virtually never an accurate reflection of what nature demonstrates. As a reflection of human beliefs and values, on the other hand, it is inevitably spot on.

NUMBERS RACKET

Within months of the 1948 publication of the first Kinsey report,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,
Kinsey's statistical approach to sexuality was so much on people's minds that it showed up on Broadway.

According to the Kinsey Report
Every average man you know
Much prefers his lovey-dovey to court
When the temperature is low

In
Kiss Me, Kate,
Cole Porter's sassy, slightly risqué lyrics for “Too Darn Hot” were not just a reference to an unprecedented and controversial
piece of research, but testament to a whole new way of thinking about sex.

Statistics, a seventeenth-century invention, had already merged with the nineteenth-century notion of demographics by the time Kinsey began his study of human sexuality in Indiana in the late 1930s. Kinsey was not the first or only person to apply a numbers-oriented approach to sexuality. Little remembered now, pre-Kinsey researchers such as Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, Lewis Terman, George Henry, and Carney Landis had already done pioneering work on topics like the sex lives of college students, attitudes about sex and marriage, same-sex sexual behavior, and gender roles. With their interviews, questionnaires, statistics, and demographic correlations, they created a whole new mode for research on sex. The profoundly subjective theoretical approaches of psychoanalysts like Freud were based on one-on-one case studies. The pathological catalogs of Krafft-Ebing and his ilk dealt only with people who had already been defined as sick, perverted, or damaged. Quantitative research on sexuality, by contrast, gave researchers a window into the generic everyday.

Like Linnaeus's quest to document every organism in God's creation, the new sexology sought to document the range of what existed. What researchers discovered was that a lot more people were having a lot more sex of a lot more kinds and varieties than anyone had previously suspected. And these people—5,300 men in the 1948 Kinsey report; 5,940 women in the 1953—were of a type that could not be easily ignored. Mostly middle-class, predominantly college-educated, typically white men and women, Kinsey's subjects were exactly the sort of people who dominated the culture of the day.

What was so remarkable about Kinsey was his relentless insistence that everyday sexual activity was a legitimate phenomenon of the natural world and a proper subject for classic bench-science observation and documentation. By regarding sexual behavior as just one more phenomenon that science could observe, Kinsey was able to reduce the effects doxa had on his ability to gather information. This dispassionate approach to sexual behavior, devoid of value judgments or moralist crusading, was an important and lasting contribution to sexology.

Kinsey's attempts to keep doxic judgment out of his data collection did nothing, however, to prevent his audience from interpreting
his data through doxa's lens. Far from it. Kinsey's methods, combined with his large sample sizes, made it possible for readers to begin thinking about sexuality not just demographically, but as a sort of representation of cultural consensus. His data, collected in a spirit of inclusivity and transparency, was often interpreted as evidence of a sort of majority rule.

This was particularly relevant because Kinsey's research indicated that, for a significant majority, the boundaries of then-current doxa and the boundaries of sexual experience matched fairly well. Anal intercourse and oral sex
were
genuinely uncommon in male/female relationships. Most penis-in-vagina intercourse
did
take place with the man on top. Men
did
report being more easily and frequently aroused than women, and people whose sexual lives exclusively involved other-sex partners
were
in the vast majority. General readers, as well as doctors, lawyers, and the media, didn't hesitate to use Kinsey's work as proof that doxa was right, that all these things were every bit as correct, right, and normative as they had always been claimed to be.

Then again, Kinsey's work also documented a great deal of heterodox sexuality. The first report's revelations of substantial amounts of masturbation, adultery, same-sex activity, premarital sex, and other transgressive activity in the general population created shockwaves. The sexually orthodox could, and most assuredly did, find affirmation and a sense of solidarity in the Kinsey reports. But so could the heterodox outliers. Contemporary sexual identity politics became possible, in part, because the sexually unorthodox could point to Kinsey's statistics as proof that they were not alone. Rather than being marginalized as “sick” or “deviant,” unorthodox sexual activities and those who practiced them could simply be characterized in mathematical terms as minorities.

This was a powerful option in those early days of the civil rights movement. The US military was racially desegregated by presidential executive order in 1948, the same year the first Kinsey report appeared, and the landmark
Brown v. Board of Education
verdict was given in 1954, the year after the second Kinsey report. Early gay liberationists enthusiastically took up similar strategies to those fighting racial injustice and began to develop their own formal identity politics. The now-canonical slogan “one in ten,” used to claim that one in ten people are homosexual, was derived from Kinsey's work by Harry
Hay, founder of the pioneering gay rights organization the Mattachine Society, who used it to lobby for inclusion and rights.

Both the status quo and the nascent agenda of sexual liberation found data they could use in Kinsey's research. The use of statistics for doxical ends hasn't slowed since. Quantitative research on sexual behavior not only continues to be a major stream of sexology, but statistically oriented sex surveys have become a mass-market standard. National periodicals like
Men's Health, Glamour, Cosmopolitan,
and even the youth-focused
Seventeen
sponsor or administer sex surveys with almost the frequency of universities or government agencies, and often in conjunction with them.[
16
]

Through this kind of intensively mainstreamed quantitative research, the general public has learned to rely on the sex survey as a means of gauging sexual performance. What “every average man you know” thinks, likes, or does sexually—or at least what he claims he does when researchers ask—is used both as proof of “how things are” in a general sense and as a yardstick for measuring individual lives.

This is somewhat problematic, because the quality of sex research is notoriously difficult to gauge. Like almost all research on human subjects, it is prone to problems like sampling bias and leading wording in questionnaires, but it is also significantly prone to problems of exaggeration and omission in respondents' answers. A 2009 study in the
Journal of Sex Research
showed that when 376 heterosexually active men and women were asked to complete separate daily and retrospective reports of how often they had engaged in penis-in-vagina intercourse over a two-month period, the reports often didn't match. When called on to recall their sex lives over the previous two months, subjects commonly reported having had more sex than their daily reports indicated had actually taken place.[
17
] This was not deliberate deception, just typical variability in terms of memory and expectations. These are endemic problems of sexuality research, and they mean that even when data is provided and collected with the best of methodology and intentions, the numbers that a sex survey generates simply may not be very accurate. Yet researchers and readers alike tend to ignore this. The numbers themselves achieve a sort of authority all their own. Even to researchers who should know better, sometimes statistics seem to create their own realities, from which people derive
new rules, new expectations, and new doxa about what is required to be sexually “normal.”

Without our even noticing it, we assist in creating sexuality doxa, perform the work of passing it along, and use it in our own lives and in our interactions with other people—including when we inadvertently adjust our accountings of our sex lives to make ourselves look better or just “more normal” when we are interviewed by sexologists. Our doxa of sex influences how we experience it, teaching us what makes good sex good and bad sex bad, standards that also, as we shall see, change over time especially for women. Doxa affects what and whom we are comfortable (movie stars) and uncomfortable (our parents) considering as sexual entities. It teaches us what desires we can express publicly without much fear of censure, and which desires we'd better make sure no one else finds out about if we don't want to get beaten up.

Doxa not only shapes how we think, feel, and act with regard to sex; it also influences what things we are capable of talking about, feeling, and thinking. Without doxa that establishes, in an “everyone knows” sort of way, that heterosexuality exists, it would be unlikely that anyone would simply claim out of the blue that it did. It is only because we live in a culture where virtually everyone
does
agree that a quality called “heterosexuality” is real that people have experiences or emotions they are capable of identifying as “heterosexual.” For most of human history, as you will recall, no one did anything of the kind. People had sexual and emotional experiences, to be sure. Perhaps they felt excited by them, or scared, or bored, or enlightened, or embarrassed. But we may be certain that it was not until after “everyone knew” that “heterosexual” was a thing one could be and experience themselves being that anyone had the experience of “feeling heterosexual.”

There is, of course, a level on which sexual activity is not a matter of doxa and meaning but merely an issue of bodies and mechanics. But we do not, as much as we might like to believe in “no strings” sex, actually engage in sexual activity on that purely mechanical level. All sexual behavior between human beings is social, and socially meaningful. Note that I do not say that all sexual behavior is important. Importance is not the same thing as meaning. But sexual activities, even
masturbation, are social activities, and all have at least some cultural significance. As David Halperin puts it, “Sexuality is not a somatic fact; it is a cultural effect.”[
18
] Doxa is both the medium that creates this thing we call “sexuality” and, simultaneously, the rulebook by which we figure out what “sexuality” means for ourselves and for everyone else.

Scientifically speaking, we don't know much about heterosexuality. No one knows whether heterosexuality is the result of nature or nurture, caused by inaccessible subconscious developments, or just what happens when impressionable young people come under the influence of older heterosexuals. We do not know whether heterosexuals have different anatomy or physiology compared to non-heterosexuals. Our knowledge of any potential differences in terms of how heterosexuals' nervous systems respond to sexual stimulus, compared to non-heterosexuals, is nonexistent.