Myths of Gender and Sexual Orientation

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As many commentators about sex research are fond of pointing out, in the fourth century B.C.E., the philosopher Plato offered a fanciful account that attributed the origins of erotic desire to divine punishment. Zeus punished the first human beings for impious and willful misbehavior by splitting them in half. Erotic love, the desire to reunite lost halves, is the legacy of that punishment. Plato’s mythology described not only the erotic entanglements of men and women but of men and men as well as women and women. Since then, the debate about the origins and meaning of eroticism, and especially same-sex eroticism, has only grown more contentious. Some twenty-five hundred years and a great deal of failed research later, questions about the origins of erotic interests still enjoy considerable prominence, though lately it has not been philosophers scientists who have taken up the inquiry, and they study not eros but sexual orientation. Genetic loading, fetal hormone exposure, and cerebral lateralization have supplanted gods, divine wrath, and mortal longings as the categories used to investigate and explain erotic desire.

Anne Fausto-Sterling and Evan Balaban have said in Dean Hamer’s 1993 report that the scientific debate about the origins of homosexuality is taking place in the midst of a highly political one about the place of gay men and lesbians in our social fabric. Given the increased frequency of hate crimes directed against homosexuals, it is fair and literal to say that lives are at stake.

Since scientific efforts to account for sexual orientation commenced in earnest in the nineteenth century, researchers have reported differences between gay and straight people in their fat distribution, metabolism, hair quality, height, lisping, lipid levels, the angles at which they carry their arms, susceptibility to paranoia, and an almost indefinite number of biophysical and psycho-developmental traits. From these alleged anatomical and behavioral differences between gay and straight people, various competing conclusions have been drawn about the origins of erotic desires: that they result from events in psychosexual development and are therefore primarily psychological in origin or that they are hormonally or genetically influenced and are therefore largely independent of psychological events.

Anne Fausto-Sterling has rightly argued that the presumptive “biological” differences between males and females are often artifacts of the projection of value-laden social expectations onto biological reality. This same kind of projection has too often been the rule in documenting alleged differences between gay and straight people. The search for biological differences has, therefore, often amounted, both in regard to gender and sexual orientation, to an investigation of social stereotypes, which is to mistake social appearance for biological or psychological reality (Anne Fausto-Sterling, 1992).

Regardless of its vocabulary and assumptions about causality, scientific research is thought to have considerable significance in judging the psychological integrity, morality, and social accommodation of various sexual orientations. For example, taking the evidence to show that homoeroticism was a psychic disorder, perhaps having roots in heredity, many psychologists in the past two centuries investigated treatments and cures. Researchers and the public alike once routinely looked to biomedicine and the health sciences to rid society of a trait they judged psychologically, if not also morally and socially offensive. By contrast, rarely–and only rarely–have there been people wanting to move from heteroerotic to homoerotic interests and identities. 3 Against this historical backdrop, some commentators worry that current sexual orientation research can only reinvigorate pathological interpretations of homoeroticism, as philosopher Eric Juengst has cautioned might happen.

Most morphological males have a dominant erotic interest in morphological females, and most morphological females have a dominant erotic interest in morphological males. This is not to say that human beings are always male or female in any uncomplicated way, for even that simple division has fluid borders in anatomy and genetics; people may be apparently male or female in anatomy but apparently the opposite in genetic endowment. Neither is it to say that those erotic interests are dictated by bodily morphology. It is merely to say that most human beings have these erotic interests and not others. Common usage designates such people as heterosexuals. There are nevertheless significant numbers of people whose sexual orientation does not fit this profile. Some males evince erotic interest only in other males, and some females evince erotic interest only in other females. Common usage designates these people as homosexuals. To complicate the mix even further, some people range across both males and females as objects of erotic interest–if not simultaneously, then at least serially during their lives. By default and linguistic convention, these people are bisexuals.

Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has offered an analysis of gender in exactly this regard, arguing that the search for biological differentiation between men and women has reflected and reinforced prevailing – but erroneous – notions of what roles women ought to play in society (Anne Fausto-Sterling, 2000).

The effort to account for this cleaving of erotic interest has a long and contentious lineage. For example, there has been considerable debate about the distribution of erotic interests in a given population and also about whether the categories underlying their study make sense. Homoeroticism has been alleged, for example, to be more common in certain nations than in others. In some cases, it was even attributed to the climate of those places. It was the case in the last century when languid Mediterranean countries were thought given to homosexuality. In fact, homoerotic interest is not necessarily more prevalent in countries where it is simply more visible or socially accommodated. As for the adequacy of the concepts at stake, sex researchers from zoologist Alfred Kinsey to anthropologist Gilbert Herdt have cautioned against taking the terms homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual to stand for natural and mutually exclusive kinds of people. They note that human erotic lives are often plastic in a way that defies easy categorization. What is the sexual orientation of a male adolescent who, for example, has sex with both male and female farm animals? What is the sexual orientation of a male who enjoys having sex with a woman in the presence of other sexually aroused men? Because of the variability of human sexual expression, some researchers believe that sexual orientations are distributed across a population in a way that could be mapped onto a bell curve between poles of homoeroticism and heteroeroticism, with most people having some measure of bisexuality in their erotic lives. Others argue that sexual orientation is bimodally distributed, with most people lumped as heterosexual or homosexual at opposite ends of a continuum, with very few bisexuals in between.

These cautions and debates are emblematic of the considerable problem in documenting the numbers of people with gay, straight, and bisexual orientations and determining why people have the erotic interests they have. Although there are obstacles to counting people according to their sexual orientations, social research can study sexual practices, labels people apply to themselves, fantasy content, and household arrangements, and thereby offer useful if not perfect generalizations about the way in which erotic interests divide. Whether science can identify the causes or determinants of sexual orientation depends in part on what sexual orientation is and what science is capable of describing the causes of sexual orientation.

Developmental geneticist Anne Fausto-Sterling has criticized LeVay’s study for mapping something as complex as sexual orientation onto a binary system that presupposes a rigid divide between erotic categories. She is certainly right to do so inasmuch as the terms homosexual and heterosexual are very rough categories. LeVay does not know, for example, whether his homosexual subjects were functionally heterosexual at one point or whether his heterosexual subjects exhibited some homoerotic desire or behavior at some point in their lives.

Rather than putting people into Procrustean categories of sexual orientation, it might be better to see people as having some sort of general capacity for erotic interests but understand that that capacity varies according to age, situation, learned and entrenched habits, and maybe, yes, some dispositional influences. It may turn out that it would be better to speak of homoerotic interests as a threshold phenomenon rather than as a trait like bone density that exists in isolation as both effect and cause from all others. Because of age, situation, and existing erotic habits, some people may more easily have an interest in homoerotic practices than others. Some can be easily nudged over the threshold by circumstances, while others resist homoeroticism more stringently.

The rhetoric of contemporary science invokes the image of unlimited control over the most elemental units of biological causality, rhetoric that raises questions about manipulation and control of a vast range of human traits. Biologist and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA James D. Watson characterized the ambitions of the Human Genome Project this way: “A more important set of instruction books will never be found by human beings. When finally interpreted, the genetic messages encoded within our DNA molecules will provide the ultimate answers to the chemical underpinnings of human existence.” Despite the fact that the majesty and benefits of the Human Genome Project are typically couched in the language of improved health and freedom from disease, which seems all to the good, it was inevitable that the project would raise questions about eugenic purposes and applications, about implications for privacy, social control, and biological manipulation. 5 If society as a whole rightly has abiding worries about the impact of the Human Genome Project, minorities such as gay people will be especially worried by efforts to uncover genetic determinants of human traits. The rhetoric of science is pungently ripe when it comes to auguring the future powers that will be handed to ordinary citizens.

It is to be noted that some of the most atrocious applications of sexual orientation science took place not in global backwaters but in the world’s most advanced cultures, advanced not only in science and the arts but also according to their own lights and rhetoric in morality as well. The mistreatment of gay people deserves lengthy chapters in British, German, and United States history, cultures that loom large in any history of human accomplishment. Is it fair to expect that the same Constitution that held sway in the United States during periods of the involuntary treatment of gay people to “cure” their homoeroticism will in the future protect gay people from the harms that might ensue an ever more powerful sexual science? This is a difficult question to answer, but there are several reasons to be somewhat optimistic that society will not fall victim to antigay atavism.

First of all, there now exist gay advocacy groups that, although limited in political clout, are nevertheless instruments of social correction. Because of the evolution of culture in general and of gay culture in particular, gay people are also now less willing to be complicit in their own mistreatment. Second, a burgeoning historical appreciation of the mistreatment of entire classes of persons offers cautionary tales for our own times, even if it is sometimes difficult to recognize oppression in and of the present. To be sure, a heightened appreciation of sufferings in the past may not translate easily into an appreciation of suffering in the present, especially when one’s status may be threatened by any shift in the social order of things, but attention to the mistreatment of women, Jews, and even gay people can be an educational vehicle by which to sensitize the present to its own ills. Thus armed with moral tales, the world can try to choose less oppressive social policies.

Historically speaking, gay rights has not been the kind of a cause that has energized politicians, social reformers, medical practitioners, or the judiciary-sometimes not even the most radically revisionist among them. One of the few major efforts to protect gay people that went forward in the United States without significant lobbying by or input from gay people involved the Model Penal Code recommendations that were drawn up by the American Law Institute. These recommendations were predicated on the decriminalization of most consensual sexual acts between adults and therefore made no mention of sodomy. 6 When Illinois became the first state to adopt these recommendations in 1960, it did so despite the fact that there were no gay political rights organizations in existence in the state at the time, and the 1969 New York Stonewall riots that are frequently taken as the starting date of the contemporary gay rights movement were still almost a decade away. Most other policy shifts favorable to gay people, though, have required considerable lobbying efforts by gay people, and protection from any malicious uses of sexual orientation science will require diligence from that quarter again. The 1996 Supreme Court decision in Romer v. Evans hardly seems conceivable without thirty years of public gay advocacy behind it. Failing the emergence of a utopian state, gay people and all people subject to sexual orientation science can and ought to seek the protection of informed consent policies and adequate privacy and confidentiality standards. In this sense, the courts and everyone with interest in protecting people from undue social intrusion, ill-treatment, and prejudicial classification can be an ally of gay people.

There are enough historical precedents to know that we should be suspicious of attempts to formulate scientific explanations of why one group differs from another, especially when those attempts are imbued with moral judgments about the comparative worth of those groups. For example, it is reasonable to believe that the attempt to differentiate between homosexual and heterosexual grew in the conceptual ground of trying to differentiate male and female, an enterprise that was itself used in defense of the social standing of men and women.

Anne Fausto-Sterling has rightly argued that the presumptive “biological” differences between males and females are often artifacts of the projection of value-laden social expectations onto biological reality. 8 This same kind of projection has too often been the rule in documenting alleged differences between gay and straight people. The search for biological differences has, therefore, often amounted, both in regard to gender and sexual orientation, to an investigation of social stereotypes, which is to mistake social appearance for biological or psychological reality.

Yet, for all its susceptibility to error, science need not be an instrument of oppression if it differentiates empirical fact from cultural fantasy. Science can debunk false claims about sexual orientation even if it is a science that offers these false claims in the first place. This process of conjecture and refutation can go forward even if science does not ultimately achieve a veridically true characterization of the world. Moral philosophy is the most developed and sophisticated method for the clarification and assessment of matters of value. As sexual science moves forward, it is the task of science to be its own most demanding critic, just as it is the task of moral philosophy to examine the values connected with science and its social uses even if it does not either achieve a veridical window on moral truth. Both science and moral philosophy should proceed with the highest order of intellectual diligence in order to stave off any prejudicial use of research.

Some commentary on sexual orientation research makes it appear that ethics must control what is otherwise a scientific effort running amok. That science and ethics come into conflict or appear to be in conflict about matters of sexual orientation is worrisome because both science and ethics have a common ancestry and common interests as guides to rational action; they have their roots in capacities all human beings share.

The question now before us is whether science and ethics can be brought together in a way that emphasizes the commonality of their origins rather than their differences. Can science and ethics work in shared awareness of their mutual concerns and thereby achieve consensus about the purpose and uses of sexual orientation research? When Friedrich Nietzsche chose Gay Science as the title of his reflections on culture and morality, he did so in order to contrast a spirit of robust and adventurous inquiry to the oppressive and limiting conventions he found prevalent in science and scholarly inquiry of the day. The entrenched contemporary use of the word gay to describe various homoerotic identities and political causes is founded on a remarkably similar self-conscious opposition to oppressive conventions and values, in this case, those conventions and values that hold homoeroticism to be pathological, criminal, and sinful.

Gay ethics has built on a rejection of heteronormative values and gone on to criticize formalistic, rigid, and inhumane social principles. It may be that science and ethics can join forces in their opposition to unfounded beliefs, whether those beliefs occur in regard to the origins of erotic interests or the value of gay people to society. If so, this conjunction would go a long way toward showing that the study of erotic desire can be not only a human activity but a profoundly humane activity as well.

References

Anne Fausto-Sterling, 1992. Myths of Gender, Basic Books, New York.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, 2000. Sexing the Body, New York.

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Myths of Gender and Sexual Orientation

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