The Sex Myth

by Rachel Hills

  In the early 1980s, the queer American anthropologist Gayle Rubin argued that there was an unspoken social hierarchy of sexual acts, in which a small number of practices (such as heterosexual marriage) were embraced, and the rest were demonized as dangerous or perverted. In an influential essay titled “Thinking Sex,” Rubin made this usually implicit hierarchy visible, arguing that its invisibility served to “rationalize the well-being of the sexually privileged and the adversity of the sexual rabble.” Thirty years later, her arguments still feel deeply familiar, holding up a mirror to long-held Western beliefs about the boundaries between “good” and “deviant” sex.

  Rubin illustrated her theories using drawings and diagrams: one of two concentric circles marking out “the charmed circle” of normal sexuality and “the outer limits” of deviant sex, and another a series of concrete walls demarcating the lines between “good” and “bad” sexual behavior and the contested areas between. If you wanted to be let into the charmed circle, the criteria were strict. “Normal” sex was heterosexual, monogamous, and preferably married—reproductive sex conducted in private within a single loving, paired relationship.

  Abnormal sex, on the other hand, was limited only by your imagination. Those condemned to the “outer limits” included people who were gay or lesbian and those who had sex outside of marriage or with too many people. “Abnormal” sex spanned masturbation, sex toys, and pornography; people who had sex in public or who found pleasure in pain; and finally, people whose desires were directed toward those much older, younger, or outside their species.

  The demarcations Rubin identified were grounded in a moral framework that asserted two things above all others: that sexual gratification should be free of exploitation (thus the blanket prohibition of bestiality and pedophilia), and that sex was meant for procreation. Straight people weren’t exempt from that second qualifier, either. When the word “heterosexual” was first coined in the late 1890s, it was used to describe someone who had a “pathological” attraction to the opposite sex—just as the word “homosexuality” was coined to describe people with a pathological attraction to the same sex. It wasn’t the gender of the people having sex that made it problematic, but the fact that it was being pursued for pleasure rather than reproduction. It was this relationship between sex and reproduction—or lack thereof—that defined perversion in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.

  Even when Rubin was writing in the early 1980s, the moral frameworks surrounding sexuality were beginning to change, and along with them the boundaries separating normal and deviant sex. Medical advances such as the oral contraceptive pill mean that the link between intercourse and childbirth is no longer inevitable. Within the secular, Western mainstream at least, the driving sexual ethic is no longer about continuing the species but about pleasure, intimacy, and fun.

  The upshot? Sex no longer has to be reproductive in order to be considered moral. Casual sex may be berated in the newspapers, but it is also expected—in numbers and frequencies much higher than it actually occurs. Sex before marriage causes consternation only in the most conservative of quarters. Purchasing a vibrator or having sex on the beach might be seen as marginally transgressive, but only in the sense that it marks the person doing it as modern and daring, rather than dull and inhibited. Certain kink practices, such as handcuffs or spanking, are no longer the exclusive purview of “perverts” and outcasts but are a mainstay of women’s magazines, advertising, and bestselling erotica. In short, people and practices that were relegated to the margins thirty years ago have become part of the mainstream.

  The other major transformation in sexual attitudes has been in relation to gay and lesbian people. Research by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has found that 68 percent of Americans born after 1981 support same-sex marriage. In the United Kingdom, the numbers are even higher: one 2012 poll found that 76 percent of people across all age groups agree with the statement that “gay couples should have exactly the same rights as heterosexual couples.”

  These numbers are a reflection of changes that have had a concrete effect on the lives of young same-sex-attracted people. I meet Portia, a twenty-three-year-old gay woman, over lunch in South London. A young trainee lawyer with olive skin and a heart-shaped face, Portia tells me she has never experienced homophobia in her life. “If people are horrified or disgusted by me, it has completely passed me by,” she says. Portia’s experiences are partly a reflection of her privilege. She is white and conventionally feminine looking, with long, honey-colored hair and a conservative sense of dress, clothed in chic tailored pants and a collared shirt. She is also upper-middle-class, having grown up with professional parents in a well-to-do but progressive pocket of the United Kingdom, which, Portia puts it, was “more Lib Dem than Tory. It wasn’t exactly a backward place.”

  But Portia’s comments are also generational, a concrete expression of the changes wrought to mainstream values by popular TV shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Will and Grace, and Glee. For most gay and lesbian people I spoke with who were even five years older than Portia, “coming out” was a major emotional undertaking, a leap of faith and identity that risked alienating family and friends. Portia’s coming out, by contrast, involved “no fanfare” at all.

  That’s not to say that it unfolded easily. When Portia was a child, the Barbie dolls she played with ditched Ken and dated each other instead. But when puberty hit and her classmates started their first awkward forays into dating, she “toed the line of fancying boys just like everyone else.” It wasn’t until Portia was fourteen that it occurred to her that she might be anything but straight. Even then, she didn’t act on it right away, waiting instead until her final year of high school to, as she puts it, “test the waters.”

  “You don’t want to go and declare to everyone that you’re a lesbian, and then change your mind and say, Oh no, I’m not anymore,” Portia explains. When she was ready to tell her family, she didn’t say that she was “gay” or “a lesbian,” only that she was dating a girl. “I wasn’t ready to fully let go of heterosexuality at that point,” she recalls. Portia has well and truly discarded heterosexuality now, but she still takes the same no-fuss approach when the subject of sex or relationships comes up in social situations.

  “I still do get that pause when I tell people I’ve got a girlfriend,” she observes. “But most people gloss over it quickly and just say something like, ‘Oh, fab.’ You’re not meant to make a big deal of [someone being gay or lesbian]; you’re meant to just acknowledge it and move on.” It is an attempt to experience the same “ordinariness” that heterosexual people take for granted—not because they are mistaken for something they are not, but because their sexual identity is so uncontroversial that it doesn’t come up in conversation at all.

  Redrawing the Borders: Who’s In and Who’s Out

  Not all young gay and lesbian people feel the same desire to be ordinary that Portia does. In an essay for the queer blog In Our Words, Chicago college student Ariana Barreto writes about her frustration at being told that she is “too pretty” to be a lesbian. “At one time, I genuinely considered ‘looking gayer’ and changing my appearance entirely,” she writes. “I wanted it so that when I walked into a room, everyone would just know that I love women, based off society’s silly stereotypes.” But for the most part, to not have your sexuality endlessly discussed is a privilege.

  And it is a privilege that not everyone has. Like Portia, Edward grew into his sexuality incrementally. A gentle, slightly goofy twenty-seven-year-old LGBT rights activist from the working-class suburbs of Massachusetts, Edward was always “into boys’ things, but from a different angle than most other boys.” When his classmates would play at being X-Men during lunch at school, he would want to take the part of Jean Grey or Storm, while the other boys argued over who would play Cyclops or Wolverine. “It was like I was on the precipice of having something in common with my peers, but it was always very clear to them tha
t I was different. It was clear to me as well, and it caused me a lot of anxiety.” The only place Edward felt at ease was at his family church, a suburban redbrick cathedral where he served as an altar boy.

  When he got to high school, Edward fell in love: with punk rock and with a girl who looked “just like Joan Jett.” He says, “She introduced me to feminism and Bikini Kill and all this progressive stuff that I’d never had any exposure to. It was shocking to me—like, you’re allowed to think that way?” He told his parents he was bisexual at fifteen, and they told him he could call himself whatever he wanted, as long as he did the “right thing.” That is to say, as long as he continued dating girls.

  Where Portia was able to emerge from the closet when and as she chose, Edward was forcibly removed from it. The defining moment came when he was in college, at a Patti Smith concert with his “Joan Jett” girlfriend. Edward was starting to wonder if he might no longer be so bisexual after all—if he might now just be gay. Others were less tentative about his sexual status. At the concert, Edward ran into a guy his girlfriend had dated during one of the “off” periods of their on-again, off-again relationship. He approached Edward aggressively, pushing him around and calling him a “faggot.”

  It wasn’t just the threat of physical violence that threw Edward off balance. It was the words his aggressor was using. “I was already struggling with the feeling that my relationship wasn’t going anywhere—that I was gay—but to have it thrown in my face like that, I just was not prepared for it,” he explains. “I don’t know how anyone could be prepared, to be honest. It was like the whole world had figured me out. I felt like I didn’t have an option to hide anymore.”

  Edward had dealt with anxiety before, but never anything of this magnitude. He found himself unable to speak or even form a sentence. “It wasn’t a matter of fight or flight, it was like fight or flight or freeze,” he says. So instead of fighting, he took so much Xanax that he was admitted to a psychiatric ward for a week and a half. When he returned from the hospital, he logged on to MySpace, changed his sexual orientation to “gay,” and said nothing more about it.

  The understatement was intentional. “Because it felt like such a big deal on the inside, I didn’t want it to be a big deal outside as well. I just wanted to kind of fly under the radar and let it be what it is, and if people wanted to talk about it, we could do that at some other point—which was my kind of coded way of saying ‘never,’ ” Edward recalls. “I spoke about it with the people I felt like it affected, like my ex—who is still a very good friend of mine—but I didn’t want to be having that conversation with my roommates. It just wasn’t comfortable for me. I didn’t want to hear them say all that, ‘Oh, we always knew!’–type stuff. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I know you did. Let’s just move on.’ ”

  Portia’s and Edward’s stories are similar in many ways. As children, they both played traditionally gendered games in nontraditional ways. They both came to terms with their sexuality slowly, taking years to try it on and think it through before eventually making a public declaration of identity. And when they did make that declaration, they both wanted to do it as quietly as possible.

  But their ability to come out quietly, to blend into the social wallpaper in the same way that a young straight person would, has been very different. Portia is a femme woman with glossy hair and a discreet sense of dress; Edward is an alternatively styled man with a nose ring and pierced ears. Portia grew up in the relatively secular United Kingdom, with liberal upper-middle-class parents; Edward was a Catholic altar boy whose family was on the poorer side of the working class. Where Portia tells me that almost half of her high school friends later came out as gay or lesbian, Edward’s high school Gay-Straight Alliance was told by the school administration that to hang a rainbow flag in the hallways would have the same impact on Christian students that a swastika would have on Jewish students.

  In other words, it is not just the acts we partake in that call us out as normal or abnormal; it is also the bodies that engage in those acts. Our race, our class, how we dress, and how conventionally attractive we are all influence the way our sexual orientation is ultimately received.

  That Edward and Portia sought to make their sexuality unremarkable at all—however successfully or unsuccessfully they were able to do so—speaks to the fact that being “unremarkable” is now an option for some young same-sex-attracted people, and to the folding of same-sex experiences into the mainstream. But not all gay and lesbian people have the option of “passing,” and those who are most able to exercise that option are those whose physical appearance, sexuality, and gender expression are otherwise as expected.

  In 2011, the Australian online activist organization GetUp! produced a YouTube video as part of their campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. The video follows an attractive young man of indeterminate ethnicity, with tanned skin and curly, light brown hair, through the eyes of his unseen lover. It opens with the man sailing across Sydney Harbor on a ferry, laughing as he meets his lover for the first time, and scrawling his phone number in the pages of a novel. The two ride a Ferris wheel at an amusement park, shop for groceries at a supermarket, and play cricket on the beach. They later move into the same house, scrub the dishes, and watch movies on the couch, celebrate birthdays together, and care for his mother while she is sick in the hospital. At the end of the video, the young man drops down on one knee and pulls an engagement ring out of a red box. Finally we see the person behind the camera—who is, of course, another attractive young man. “It’s time,” the video declares.

  It is a beautiful video that effectively shows that a love story is a love story, regardless of the genders of the people involved. It was also extremely popular, attracting more than fifteen million views on YouTube at the time of this writing. But intentionally or not, it also illustrates how the acceptance of previously marginalized sexual groups like gays and lesbians hinges on their fitting the “norm” in every other way. It is relatively easy to embrace a pair of conventionally attractive, conventionally masculine men who also happen to enjoy middle-class domestic pursuits like dinner parties, barbecues, monogamy, and the beach. But what about gay men who are naturally more effete, or lesbians who eschew the markers of conventional femininity? What about the same-sex-attracted people who don’t want marriage or monogamy, or who build their families around the communities they choose rather than the people who raised them? Same-sex relationships may be more accepted than they used to be, but the relationships that are embraced most are the ones that most closely mirror the old standards.

  The same ambivalence can be observed in the mainstreaming of another previously marginalized activity, BDSM. Kink is cool now when it is merely a “naughty” posture tried on for novelty and variety. But it is less so when it is part of the more serious work of identity—that is to say, when it is something you need in order to get off rather than just an adventurous addendum. Would Ben’s alcohol-inspired confessions of handcuffs and bondage have been so positively received if they had been seen as the raison d’être of his sexuality, rather than as an entrée to the main event of intercourse?

  On the less trendy side of the nonnormative divide lie people like Nyn, a twenty-three-year-old sex-positive, polyamorous trans man living in the northwest of England. None of those qualities make him unusual within the progressive, sexually open scene he inhabits. “I live in a community which is pretty comfortable with alternative genders and sexualities,” he explains. But people like Nyn are still largely invisible in most parts of the media. Gay and lesbian people may be “normal” now, but trans and genderqueer people are still treated as puzzles that need to be solved. And while no-strings-attached sex is expected among people of a certain age and class, monogamy is still assumed to be the desired endpoint of any relationship.

  Even within Nyn’s own group of friends, there are norms and expectations to grapple with. “Because I am honest and open about my preferences, people expect me to have far more sex, and in far
more interesting and exotic ways, than I actually do,” he observes. “Mentioning that I spent the evening with my partner and two other people who are part of my poly group can lead to speculations of orgies, rather than us sharing a meal and watching movies. When I sleep in a friend’s bed, I now realize that I need to clarify that we didn’t have sex. And while I will happily give people condoms and lube when I’m being activisty, the assumption people take from that is that I have a great deal of kinky, penetrative sex.”

  If being “normal” means having your sexuality removed from discussion, people like Nyn, who still exist at the margins, are seen only through the lens of their gender and sexuality. “There’s this idea that because you’re kinky, you’re vastly experienced and up for anything,” Nyn says, jokingly referring to what he calls “the Land Where People Have More/More Interesting Sex.”

  “People who believe in this land, and believe that they are outsiders to it, don’t want to offend people who live there by saying the wrong thing,” he says. “They realize that a lot of what they might have heard about could be wrong. But they assume there must be something interesting happening. So if you try to ask people what they expect of you, or why they jump toward thinking that sleeping over at a friend’s house means some kind of kinky orgy, you end up with a weird miscommunication, where they are trying to allude to this Big Secret which they are sure you know about and demonstrate that they are accepting of your wild ways. At the same time, you actually had a Disney film marathon and don’t think that there is any Big Secret, because even if there is a mysterious Land Where People Have More/More Interesting Sex, you certainly don’t live there. After all, your experience is just normal for you.”