Until today, I haven’t been much interested in the topic of Elena Kagan’s sexual orientation. I see sexual identity as self-assigned and distinct from any behavioral practice. So, if a guy, a social conservative clinical psychologist minister, say, rents a boy to carry his luggage and happens to get some massages along the way, he’s not gay! Not even if the nature of those massages falls into the category of homosexual behavior.
So I’m happy to accept that the woman is straight. But what if things change later? A few years back New York Magazine ran an article on Gaydar and the Science of Sexual Orientation. This passage on the fluidity of female sexuality raises the question:
In many [studies] lesbians have appeared less unique than gay men, leading some people to wonder if their sexual orientation is innate. Michael Bailey-who, as a heterosexual researcher, is a minority in this field-even doubts the existence of female sexual orientation, if by orientation we mean a fundamental drive that defies our conscious choices. He bases this provocative gambit on a sexual-arousal study he and his students conducted. When shown pornographic videos, men have an undeniable response either to gay or straight images but not both, according to sensitive gauges attached to their genitals-it’s that binary. Female sexual response is more democratic, opaque, and unpredictable: Arousal itself is harder to track, and there is evidence that it defies easy categorization. “I don’t yet understand female partner choices very well, and neither does anyone else,” Bailey wrote me in an e-mail. “What I do think it’s time to do is admit that female sexuality looks in some ways very different from male sexuality, and that there is no clear analog in women of men’s directed sexual-arousal pattern, which I think is their sexual orientation. I am not sure that women don’t have a sexual orientation, but it is certainly unclear that they do.”
He contends that what they have instead is sexual preference-they might prefer sex with women, but something in their brains can still sizzle at the thought of men. Many feminist scholars agree with this assessment, and consider sexuality more of a fluid than an either-or proposition, but some don’t. “I think women do have orientations, but they don’t circumscribe the range of desires that women can experience to the same degree as men,” says Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, who is writing a book [since published] on the subject. “For women, there’s more wiggle room. You can think of orientation as defining a range of possible responses, and for women, it’s much broader.”
Bailey is a controversial figure in the LGBT community. He “notoriously declared that true male bisexuality doesn’t exist [more here] and dismissed many transgender people as peculiar sexual fetishists.” The female sexual orientation observation is one I find plausible and intriguing nonetheless.
A fun way to illustrate the point… from Susan Sontag, as quoted in a May 2000 Guardian piece:
“As I’ve become less attractive to men, so I’ve found myself more with women. It’s what happens. Ask any woman my age. More women come on to you than men. And women are fantastic. Around 40, women blossom. Women are a work-in-progress. Men burn out.”
My experience says it’s true (er, at least that women blossom part). So even if Elana decides later in life that she’d like to settle down with a woman, that doesn’t mean she’s not straight today.
RELATED: The photo is from Glenn Greenwald’s excellent Salon piece noting that…
the outraged objections of many Good Liberals to the mere discussion of Elena Kagan’s sexual orientation. Without realizing it, they’ve completely internalized one of the most pernicious myths long used to demand that gay people remain in the closet: namely, that to reveal one’s sexual orientation is to divulge one’s “sex life.”
He goes on:
The fact that someone would equate “are you gay?” to “do you download a lot of porn from the internet?” is astonishing to me. The latter question really is about someone’s “sex life,” while the former is about who they are.
J. Michael Bailey was also featured in this 60 Minutes segment on the science of sexual orientation.
You can find me @jwindish, at my Public Notebook, or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com.