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My e-mail inbox has been filling up lately with invitations to the Seventh International Bisexuality Conference being held in Sydney, Australia from 25 - 28 October. While I appreciate the interest, I will not be attending, on the reasonable grounds that I don't consider myself bisexual. Not only am I not bisexual, but I don't know anyone who is. I have friends of different races, sexes, sexualities, ages, nationalities, religions, personality types, heights, hair colour, employment status and artistic abilities, but I have no friend or colleague that calls themself bisexual. In fact, the last time I came across anyone who called himself bisexual was a long time ago at university, when several of us used the term while we adjusted to the fact that we were really gay. To be honest, I'm not convinced that true bisexuality - in the sense of equal sexual and emotional attraction to both men and women - exists, except perhaps as a tiny minority of the population. I hold that view because there are such tremendous differences between the male and female physique, as there are between the male and female psyche (whether the psyche is innate or sociologically determined needn't bother us here). For most of us, the question of whether you want to spend the rest of your life waking up next to stubble or full breasts is pretty fundamental to our sense of who we are and it is difficult to believe that there is a significant segment of the population who wouldn't care one way or the other. Of course many people can perform sexually with either sex and many form deep emotional attachments to both the same and the opposite sex and if that's your definition of bisexuality, then a large minority of us are. However, most of us have a very clear idea of the sex of the partner that we would most like to copulate with most of the time. Many bisexuals explaining themselves by claiming that they are attracted to one or other sex at different times in their lives. They may see that as an advantage which the rest of us lack, but to me the inability to make a clear choice is more an indication of indecision and insecurity than anything else. Proponents of the bisexual point of view often argue that all sexual desire is socially determined. Certainly some aspects of it are - cavemen presumably got through life without being troubled by a fetish for fishnet stockings or rubber - but something deeper must be going on that ensures fairly consistent attraction for the opposite sex in the majority of the population, followed by an equally consistent attraction for the same sex in a minority of the population. (And we are talking every population here, not just those of us where gay rights are part of the social and political discourse.) In fact, while there has been great debate in many societies about the causes and manifestations of homosexual and heterosexual behaviour, in none of the many discussions I have come across has there been any explanation as to what the mechanics of sexual desire are. And without that discussion, the rest of the debate is meaningless. So let me spend the rest of this column analysing that point. First, let me separate out some of the issues. I'll begin with sexual desire and sexual behaviour. Most of the time, at least in Western countries, our sexual behaviour reflects our sexual desire. I want to have sex with a man, he wants to have sex with me, we have sex, end of story. At times, however, our desire and behaviour do not match: men who live in a society where homosexuality is strictly taboo may recognise their attraction to men but nonetheless only have sex with women. Similarly, a happily married man who spends twenty years in prison may find himself a sexual and emotional partner among the other men. (The same examples obviously apply to women.) Now focus a little more closely on sexual desire itself. And bring in not sexual behaviour but sexual reaction - spontaneous erection in men and release of vaginal fluids in women. Some people - Freud is often cited as an authority - argue that sexual reaction is ubiquitous at birth and becomes focused into sexual desire as we grow older. Everything is sexual to the new born child and socialisation determines which sex we become attracted to. There isn't much proof for that theory, and, given the very different environments in which children grow up, it is surprising that there are only two (all right, three, if you insist on bisexuality) sexualities. If our original sexual desire is indeed polymorphous as Freud suggests, some of us would grow up to be turned on by pieces of furniture, others by dogs or camel dung or Beethoven sonatas, the stars, the 8.42 to Wimbledon and so on. In such circumstances it would be surprising if even ten percent of us ended up homo-, hetero- or bisexual. The reality is, that most of us are sexually and emotionally attracted to human beings, which suggests that our body chemistry is preset at least to the extent that we prefer our own species. And most personal experiences confirms this. If you talk to people about their first sexual awareness, many can go back to a time long before they were even aware what sex was. Certainly, I must have been no more four years old when I was aware that drawings of some men in a history book (of all things) excited and interested me in a way I could neither imagine or express. And being brought up in a more innocent age, this was several years before I was told the heterosexual facts of life, which I found of no more than the vaguest intellectual interest. Certainly there seems to be increasing acceptance that our sexuality is determined before birth. A few years ago that theory was briefly connected with a specific gene, although that story seems to have dropped out circulation. At the same time, there was a theory that the state of our hypothalamus reflected our sexual desire, although theory was quickly abandoned on several grounds. But what is interesting - and finally I'm getting the point I want to make - is that no theory has yet looked at the mechanics of sexual desire. And unless we agree on those mechanics, there is no point in the rest of the debate. Let me explain. (For the sake of brevity, and familiarity with my own sex, I'll stick with men, and leave you to substitute the appropriate vocabulary for women.) At one level, as I have pointed out, sexual desire is a learned response. I mean not only the fishnet stockings and the rubber clothing, but, for eample, whether we prefer taller or shorter partners, of bigger or smaller build, older or younger, etc etc. But I believe there is a more basic level that exists in childhood and adolescence, whereby our sexual reaction to men or women is innately determined. And I want to know how that functions. What is it in the other person that our bodies and / or brains are reacting to, when the gates open and blood floods into the penis? In other words, leaving aside all the social baggage, why does the average twenty-year heterosexual man get an erection at the thought of sex with women, while his homosexual brother gets one at the thought of sex with men? Is it something each of them sees, either in front of them, or in their imagination? That seems unlikely. In Victorian England men could reach that age without ever seeing a naked female, while African men would see naked woman, at least from the navel up, frequently. For the same mechanism to be functioning in both the English and African's brain, there would need to be something in common, and all that leaves you with is the face. It might therefore be that women's and men's faces suggest an imprint to which our bodies either react or don't react. But if that were the case, then people blind from birth would have no sexual desire, which is of course untrue. (Not to mention that in struct Muslim societies few young men would see a woman's face.) So if we aren't turned on by what we see, is it something we hear? Again unlikely, since deaf people are also sexually active. The answer is, I suggest, smell. That way below our level of perception, our sense of smell recognises differences between the sexes that probably reflect their levels of oestrogen or testosterone. And that linking of the sense of smell and sexual response is determined through some form of body chemistry that have not yet investigated or understood. At some point, probably in the womb, connections are made that will develop into the the mechanics of sexual desire. Initially, it is a simple equation of, for heterosexual men, women's smell causes body chemistry to change, leading to erect penis. As each man gets older, that pre-Pavlovian response gets modified, so that less and less it is all women, and more and more specific types of women, that generates that response. Getting back to bisexuals… If my theory is correct - and since no-one else has come up with a theory of the mechanics of sexual desire - it is likely that bisexuality reflects an absence of subliminal ability to determine a partner's sex through smell. Which may be something to talk about in Sydney. Let's leave it there - The Foreman Theory of Sexual Reaction. It may be hogwash, but like the flatness of the planet, the existence of the Tooth Fairy and God, and the extent of George W Bush's compassion, it will be believed by some, if not many, until it is disproved. |
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| 30 August 2002 |
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© Martin Foreman |