Elf Sternberg

In The American Conservative magazine, Amy L. Wax has an article entitled "More Women Have Joyless Sex Than You Think." In it, she writes about "poking around" on Internet sex advice sites, listing what she describes as:

… a steady, low-level hum of complaints about unsatisfying sexual encounters and lack of desire, whether in one-night stands, dating situations, or long-term relationships.

From this haphazard set of sources emerges a picture of female libido as a complicated, mysterious business that resists a systematic understanding of its vagaries, triggers, and circumstances. Female sexuality is mercurial, unpredictable, and radically contingent.

And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Amy L. Wax, a woman, is wrong about womens' sexuality, because as a bisexual man, I don't know a single bisexual man who agrees with this assessment of womens' sexual desire.

Because here's the thing about bisexual men: most of us have bottomed— that is, been the one taking the fingers, dicks and toys, rather than wielding them. We know what the vulnerability of being the penetrated partner is like. We know what it's like to be open to someone else, to put yourself at risk, to open yourself up to their attention.

That experience and knowledge is, more or less, why so many bisexual men have no trouble establishing and maintaining meaningful and and powerful sexual relationships with women. We know what they've been through; we know why their sexuality is so "radically contingent." It's simple, really:

Trust is hard.

In every sexual encounter I've ever had with a woman— and that's a fairly high number, now that I've reached 50— the number of things she wanted was short, simple, and profound: she wanted me to be enthusiastic for what she wanted, she wanted me to be attentive to her pleasure from beginning to end, and more than anything else, she wanted to be reassured that I regarded her with compassion and respect, and would do so afterward.

Apparently, that's a very hard set of requirements for many men to live up. Either they're not very attentive to women, or they're not very enthusiastic about her needs, or they're not all that compassionate and respectful.

Hardly surprising, I guess. Nothing in their experience really prepares them to be any of those things for women. When I was growing up, I was taught that sex was something I "got" from women, I "acquired" it through hook or crook, and I was in competition with other men to get it. That meant women weren't equal, they were the field we battled over, they were the mud in which we were supposed to "get dirty."

When I started dating guys, I had that experience every bi guy gets if he's coming from the straight side of the scale: something is different about this. It's more equal. Sex writer Suzie Bright once said she liked watching gay porn more than straight, because gay porn was between equals, "like watching two tigers wrestle." There's an ebb and flow, even between pre-arranged tops and bottoms, of taking charge and choosing the next step, that's rare among women.

And then, most bi guys have the follow-on reaction: This is nice. Why can't it be like this with a woman? And then, the smart ones, we try to figure out how to make it be like this with a woman. Because men having sex with men have, more often than straight encounters, all of things a woman wants out of a sexual encounter: enthusiasm, attention, and respect for each other afterward. Because what women want, what anyone wants who has to become vulnerable to become sexual, is to feel safe.

Trust may be hard. But it's not impossible.

I tracked down that "Sexual Left" speaker, Todd Herman, and discovered that he had gone into some detail about his argument, but let's just say that he's materially wrong on some particulars, and morally wrong overall.

Herman points to a "John Hopkins Study" meta-review of "over 200 peer-reviewed studies looking at sexual orientation and gender identity," one that concludes that sexual orientation is fluid in adolescence and becomes less so as one gets older; the hope here is that with early intervention one can be, I guess, oriented "correctly," as the right would wish it.

His study claims that queer folk are more likely to have been abused as children, and are more likely to commit suicide, and that for "the left" to perpetuate a sexual identity that is so obviously damaging is "savage," and the left deserves to be labeled as such. He says "This is not about people being gay. The sexual left simply wants to use you as pawns," but if orientation is so fluid, and a queer orientation so damaging that it requires correction, then this is exactly about people being gay— and trying to stop them from being gay.

Let's start with the basics. The report is called Sexuality and Gender, was sponsored by The New Atlantis, an ivory tower of theologically-inspired right-wing thought. (I last tussled with a New Atlantis piece when they published a high-minded article worrying about how eliminating all disease would deprive people of the "edifying" experience of watching their children sicken and die.) The paper was not peer-reviewed, which means that any conclusions that it reaches were not vetted by an audience.

Todd Herman is wrong about what the paper says. The paper never describes how the fluidity of sexual orientation may be manipulated to ensure a heterosexual identity in post-adolescence. In fact, it says the possibility of such manipulation may be impossible, but that doesn't mean researchers should stop trying, and this being the New Atlantis, it strongly discourages people from encouraging or validating non-heterosexual identification until that research is done.

The report that sexual minorities experience abuse at higher rates than straight peers has three problems with it: (1) it's a matter of self-reporting, and queer communities have a stronger tradition of speaking out than straight ones; (2) it's acausal, so we have no idea if abuse might cause some people to be queer, or if a queer presentation in youth might encourage abuse; (3) it says absolutely nothing about the vast majority of queer people who never experienced abuse as a minor.

If you want a well-vetted, well-respected, well-cited version of this paper, Bailey, Vasey, et. al. Sexual Orientation, Controversy and Science is a much better paper that states "there is considerably more evidence supporting nonsocial causes of sexual orientation than social causes" and that

This evidence includes the cross-culturally robust finding that adult homosexuality is strongly related to childhood gender nonconformity; moderate genetic influences demonstrated in well-sampled twin studies; the cross-culturally robust fraternal-birth-order effect on male sexual orientation. In contrast, evidence for the most commonly hypothesized social causes of homosexuality—sexual recruitment by homosexual adults, patterns of disordered parenting, or the influence of homosexual parents—is generally weak in magnitude and distorted by numerous confounding factors.

Herman is trying to make politics out of biology, but we have to remember his audience. He's not really trying to pry queer people away from their generally leftist bent; he's giving his alt-right audience the red meat they crave (and sexual orientation and its moral worth is an alt-right issue, just as much as melanin production is somehow also indicative of moral worth). Gay people need to be "loved" until they change, and if they won't change, they need to be demonized as unreasonable and unAmerican.

Omaha and I went to the annual Bi-Net picnic. Well, we tried to. We tried to arrive "in Ravenna Park" (which is all the instruction we had) at 3:00, but we didn't actually find the place until almost four because Ravenna is a big freaking park and "in Ravenna Park" is not a location, dammit.

But we did find them, and the kids had hot dogs and went and played with other kids who'd shown up, and let the adults alone to chat under the beautiful day with its hot sun and cool breeze.

And, y'know, we were hardly on the cutting edge of human sexuality out there. We were mostly middle-aged (and showing it), mostly comfortable if not successful, and most of us were, well, oriented more or less out of convenience; very few of us had same-sex partners at the time. One or two.

Still, I don't think there's anything in particular to draw from that. It was a mostly quiet and pleasent event with good people who have, for the most part, "Been there, done both," as George's (the organizer) t-shirt put it. Eventually, we collected up the kids and walked back through the park to the playground. On the walk, I couldn't help but remark about how odd Ravenna is. It's a small water-carved canyon in the middle of the city, big and deep enough that it's actually hard to hear the noise of the city and overgrown in a wild and untamed way, with rough paths cut through it. For all you can tell, you're hundreds of miles from the nearest civilization. It's very cool.