"fluid sexuality a superpower" says Dan Savage

[ellenkushner]

in this week's Savage Love column (rated R),

As for "playing for the other team" at college . . . that can indeed be just a phase—but for women, not men. Heterosexual and homosexual women, if legit scientific research is to be believed, "tend to become sexually aroused by both male and female erotica, and, thus, have a bisexual arousal pattern," according to the results of a 2003 study conducted at LUG-infested Northwestern University. Men, on the other hand, prefer erotica that plays exclusively to their professed sexual orientation. Which means, of course, that female sexuality is a fluid and male sexuality is a solid. Or something.

And ladies? Pointing out your fluid sexuality isn't an insult. It's a compliment—hell, it's a freakin' superpower.

Should I even leave this open for comments, given my limited time and even more limited bandwidth this week?

Oh, wotthell. Go for it.

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Sorry, who is this amazing jerk? One of the benefits of living this side of the Atlantic is that, while we have creeps of our own, this particular idiot hipster is not one we know.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

They have no Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Love) in your country?

[glasshouses.livejournal.com]

I love Dan, but I'm sure he'll get pounded for that. No bisexual men, eh?

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Let the fur fly!

I love him, too, though, just for being out there expressing strong opinions, even when he's probably wrong - he creates a space to discuss stuff that just doesn't usually make it into our finer tabloids.... And sometimes, you know, he's Right.

[lisatheriveter.livejournal.com]

While I do not necessarily appreciate or condone his phrasing, I do think that Dan Savage has a point here.

It has been my experience as a bisexual that there are, in most places I've been, vastly more women than men who choose to self-label this way. I don't know why that it; I suspect it may be equal parts that straight culture is more accepting of women who occasionally sleep with other women than of men who do the same, and that lesbian culture is more tolerant of gay women who once slept with men. It is also true that in a lot of places, it is still very hard to be a man who sleeps with men, so things like passing and living on the down low complicate the issue and muddy the perceptive waters.

The fact that women of all sexualities find beauty and arousal in types of erotica that do not portray their preferred sexual activities may have less to do with fluid sexuality than with the fact that women are socialized to judge and appreciate each other's attractiveness irrespective of the desire to act upon that appreciation sexually. How many of us have greeted friends at a nightclub by exclaiming, "You look so hot!" And how many times have we done that while hoping that at night's end we would be kissing our friend? In my experience, one usually has nothing to do with the other.

So I don't know. I don't know what it all means, but I do find it interesting, and I think that there is a valid point there. Just not sure what conclusions we should draw from it.

[rm.livejournal.com]

How he can argue for sexual fluidity as a superpower while he's so busy being binary about gender and attraction boggles the mind.

It also emphasizes how not keen I am on the whole push for "being queer is biological." I really, really don't think that piece of information, to whatever extent it's proven, is going to make people chill out in the way folks think it's going to.

[peregrinejohn.livejournal.com]

Yes! That's exactly it! Thank you thank you, I was trying to pin down the dichotomy that nagged at my mind halfway through his... uh, article. Diatribe. Whatever.

There is this strange notion that all women are actually bi, and no men are, and it's not exactly limited by gender or location. Me, I call things by the Kinsey scale. As the Doctor wrote, "Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories... The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects."

Needless to say, this goes for both sexes. That so many gay men don't get it suggests to me that, irritating as it may be, there may be a reason for the disconnect. I suspect that it is simply that the inverted bell curve of the Kinsey scale has a different shape for each gender. But that is a totally wild-assed guess.

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

We consistently present women as sex objects, and cast male desire for women as the default sexuality without leaving a whole heck of a lot of room for women's desire for men, men's desire for men, women's desire for women, and so on.

Is it possible that IF, as this "study" says, women's sexuality is more "fluid", as measured by watching porn, that is because that is the behavior that is modeled and approved of? That if I want to find sexual material to enjoy, almost all of it is going to be geared toward straight men, and unless I'm resourceful and diligent I'd better learn to identify with the straight male point of view or go hungry (like I had to when I was young and we didn't have the internet)? Couldn't the saturation of het male sexuality be a factor here? How about the way that (conventionally attractive) lesbians are objectified by straight men, thus including them in the straight male's spectrum of sexual desirability, whereas gay men are not fetishized like that?

These are all factors, and I don't think this study says anything about how women inherently are. It says a lot about how women are trained to behave in this culture. Human sexuality is fluid. Men, too. However, the exercise of fluid female sexuality has been idealized and somewhat embraced, we appreciate women in sexual terms. Men, not so much.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

If I was going to pull any wild theories out of my parts, I would go with this one.

I'm pretty sure what attraction to women I have comes out of that ability everyone who's not white guys has to assume the perspective of white guys.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

And because God knows there are no men who identify gay who occasionally sleep with women, or vice versa.

This whole gay/straight/bisexual thing is a modern construct, Dan. Get with the program.

Are any of the people commenting guys?

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

He's qualifying this. I've read some of the research and some comments elsewhere. Bisexual guys do appear to be rarer than bisexual women. The studies appear to show that all women have a wider range of things that turn them on (lub check for the women; erection tests for the guys) than do the guys). The qualifier is "if legit scientific research is to be believed."

The argument against no-bi guys was that porn isn't the only stimulus that would get males aroused, that individuals might respond differently in RL than when watching a movie. Also, how turned on do you get with gadgets on or in your genitalia.

[phoenix64.livejournal.com]

I do think the study and Savage are perhaps ignoring the part where women have been the standard of sexual beauty in our culture.

Oh, actually it looks like naamah_darling said everything I wanted to say, and probably more eloquently than I would have.

[laurenpburka.livejournal.com]

I'm a woman married to a guy, but I think that most men just look darned silly with their clothes off. I don't think that I feel this way cause of cultural standards of sexual beauty. I think it's cause most guys are more laughable than erotic with their bits wiggling around, while if you can get a little out of the mainstream and get realistic bodies, I think that naked women are hot.

Bet I'm not the only woman who feels this way either, and in most cases this isn't something that society forced on us.

[amy34.livejournal.com]

I remember reading about that research a few years ago in this article: What Makes People Gay? Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/08/14/what_makes_people_gay/?/?page=full). A quote from the article:

"Researchers at Northwestern University, outside Chicago, are doing this work as a follow-up to their studies of arousal using genital measurement tools. They found that while straight men were aroused by film clips of two women having sex, and gay men were aroused by clips of two men having sex, most of the men who identified themselves as bisexual showed gay arousal patterns. More surprising was just how different the story with women turned out to be. Most women, whether they identified as straight, lesbian, or bisexual, were significantly aroused by straight, gay, and lesbian sex. 'I'm not suggesting that most women are bisexual,' says Michael Bailey, the psychology professor whose lab conducted the studies. 'I'm suggesting that whatever a woman's sexual arousal pattern is, it has little to do with her sexual orientation.' That's fundamentally different from men. 'In men, arousal is orientation. It's as simple as that. That's how gay men learn they are gay.'"

Sounds like sexuality and arousal patterns are pretty complicated.

[(Anonymous)]

Women's bodies become sexually aroused when they watch bonobo porn.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/06/12/bisexuality/index.html

[squirrel-monkey.livejournal.com]

Ah, men studying female sexuality -- always fun. Let me guess, they used those 'probes'? And equated arousal and desire? And only considered porn as means of stimulating said desire? And based on that one study men are discussing female sexuality? Oh science no.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

How come men don't get "probes"? I'm jealous!

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

I love Dan savage, both for the superpower quote and the last paragraph.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

This is Dan Savage being Dan Savage, after all -- and I for one am cheerfully amused by the "superpower" characterization.

Also, what lisatheriveter and naamah_darling said.

As someone who now has occasion to use the phrase "my ex-boyfriend Sarah," I think I may have gone beyond fluid and into "liquefy" territory (thanks, Alison Bechdel).

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

Who the heck would want to have sex with water?

[csinman.livejournal.com]

Women + showerheads = hilarious stereotype! ;)

[vcmw]

For stuff on gender and sexuality, I vastly prefer Andrea Nemerson's column in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. I read Dan Savage for the humor, but I actually trust Ms. Nemerson's viewpoint.

[safirasilv.livejournal.com]

Dan Savage is silly and sometimes annoying...but I always have secretly regarded my sexual-omnivore status as a super-power.

[megmccarron.livejournal.com]

I think one issue of more women identifying as bisexual is the fact that women are trained not to consider their own desires, but to be desired by men. Men are encouraged to desire, women specifically, but they also live in a culture that devalues women. So as difficult as coming out as a gay guy can be, they are people who've been raised to pursue what they want sexually, and have been exposed to, on some level, the idea that women are inferior etc (see savage's post about comparing women's genitals to canned ham).

I fully believe that there are bisexual people, but I do wonder if some women are more comfortable identifying as "bisexual" than "gay" because of this negative patriarchal bullshit, rather than their "sexual superpower." "Fluid sexuality" can be great, but it can also be an entrapping tool that suggests women want anything and have little agency or specific desires of their own.

[peregrinejohn.livejournal.com]

Something that you are probably aware of is that the current state of assumptions (women more likely to be bi, men pretty much one or t'other) has not always been so. Even in Western society, as recently as a couple hundred years ago, it was more or less reversed, especially for certain stations of men.

And this doesn't begin to cover other societies at various times, some of which included regular homosexual behavior by men who considered themselves "straight" (as we'd now put it - though obviously the point of view was different enough to make the idea almost nonsensical).

[csinman.livejournal.com]

Maybe this is just because I think he's great, but I'm pretty sure he's not talking about a biological proclivity of women. I think he just means that in most Western society, men are less likely to explore the length of the Kinsey scale than women. It's culturally true for America, where Mr. Savage lives, whether anyone likes to admit it or not. How many straight guys do you see getting drunk and macking on each other at bars?

[lostwanderfound.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, ABC Radio National's weekly psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science program All In The Mind (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/) recently broadcast a decent overview of the current state of play in "causes of sexual orientation" research. Transcript and MP3 over here (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2008/2314505.htm).

[filenotch.livejournal.com]

I think the one point not raised here is this: A lot of gay men have dealt with "bisexual" men who really just wanted both heterosexual privilege and dick. It's infuriating to take the world's slings and arrows from being out and yet be used that way.

(and yes, I could be opening the door for, "but women have been used for sex for centuries," yet I think there's a slight difference in emphasis in my point. I'm not talking about tricks, but about "bi" men who enter relationships and go back to women/wives)

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I think the one point not raised here is this: A lot of gay men have dealt with "bisexual" men who really just wanted both heterosexual privilege and dick. It's infuriating to take the world's slings and arrows from being out and yet be used that way.

This (with genders edited appropriately) is EXACTLY what many lesbians say about having relationships with bisexual women, though. So I don't see how this supports Savage's point?

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Pansexuality is, indeed, a superpower! YAY!

Dan Savage, charming curmudgeon though he is, is very trapped in binary thinking (which is why he is so unsound on trans issues as well).

[beardedwoof.livejournal.com]

Ugh Dan Savage is one of those annoying pretentious professional gay men (by professional gay I mean that he sees being a gay male as his entire identity as a person and not just a small aspect of himself and his entire life), and he's best not taken seriously at all and just with a grain of salt.

The fact that he's biphobic is annoying but it just shows what a bigot and an idiot he really is.

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