Choice, feminism

Cynthia "Miranda" Nixon chose to be gay. Good for her? Not so simple!

The principle controversy here is that if homosexuality is or can be a choice, that's ammunition for homophobes. Why all the fuss about same-sex marriage, opponents will say, if the gay-identified could simply choose to fall in love with members of the opposite sex? But! In the interest of letting consenting-adults figure things out for themselves, why not fight for the right to be gay and not oppressed, however one arrived at that self-identification? And so on.

The Nixon quote has launched a discussion about sexual orientation (that you can readily find using the search engine of your choice), but it might be just as well-suited to one of female sexuality (which is what you'll find here).

It's difficult, I think we can agree, to picture terribly many men claiming they chose to be gay. This is in part because homophobia is arguably more virulent as directed against gay men and boys than lesbians. (And how perceived-homosexuality is dealt with. A girl who likes softball versus a guy who likes musical theater, regardless of their orientations.) This relates, of course, to the alleged female ambiguity in this area - to the popularly-held and utterly absurd belief that all women are bisexual.

The idea that all women could go either way can't be separated from the idea that men, but not women, are visual creatures. If Woman can find herself sexually attracted to a man once she learns that he's rich/powerful/Newt Gingrich, it's not a great leap to suggest that Woman could, with enough feminist notions, enough had-it-with-men, enough we-could-totally-go-shoe-shopping-together, who knows, become the romantic partner of another woman. And this is perhaps what it means for Cynthia Nixon to consider herself not a bisexual woman currently involved with a woman, but a person with this magical capacity to find a person of either sex attractive, because it's the person, not the gender, that counts.

These traits that seem to make women the darlings of progressive values - straight-identified women aren't limiting themselves to only "hot" partners! Women aren't limiting themselves by sexual orientation! - add up to something else entirely. It's about denying the basic fact of female sexuality, which is that it's a subset of human sexuality. Humans tend to find some other humans, but not all others, sexually desirable. This is true of the experience of women who are straight, gay, or bisexual. It's not that other factors - kindness, sense of humor, status - don't matter. It's not that clever pick-up techniques never persuade. It's that women, like men, divide the world into the potentially-sexually-appealing, and the not-ever-gonna-happen. It's that women, like men, will notice "hot" in its more salient manifestations. It's not that female sexuality is male sexuality, it's not "I'm a Samantha!" (SATC reference acceptable given news item inspiring post) or that women are, on average, as interested as men are in images of context-free nudity. It's that the two are not as different as all that.

OK, the counterargument: Sure, it's liberating, in a sense, that women feel less constrained than men do to find "hot" that which society deems "hot." Of course it's a good thing for women with same-sex attraction that they're not victims of a societal force quite as pernicious as the one aimed at men attracted to men. But it's not terribly liberating that female desire - homosexual or heterosexual - is popularly understood to basically not exist. It sounds all of it so lefty and pomo, yet we're as good as back with Caitlin Flanagan, learning that adolescent girls desire boyfriends, husbands, and merely put up with "hook-ups" as a (misguided! poor dears) route to that end.

So, my three readers, pardon the repetition, but this is exactly why you get so many straight women making the seemingly insensitive/clueless assertion that they are gay men trapped inside female bodies. A claim that would seem to make light of the oppression faced by gay men and boys, but that's at once offensive and about a couple legitimate things. One, there's no way to describe lust-for-man except in terms of that which gay men experience, because women are presumed incapable of fantasies that don't end in bourgeois homemaking, and two, straight women, much like gay men, are stigmatized for this attraction. Men, in our society, are not to be denigrated in that way, to be treated as objects.

I suppose that, by now, if this were a Feministe thread and not a WWPD post, I'd be accused of hijacking the discourse, stealing the virtual microphone from someone doubly marginalized (female and gay) and making it about, if not precisely myself because I'm ancient, married, etc., but about myself insofar as I'm a straight woman who was once a girl who got through many a boring high school class by "choosing" to have crushes on boys in my line of vision. So be it, but I'm confident enough in WWPD's relative powerlessness when it comes to discourse-shifting that this is a risk I'll take.