<< The Pioneers of New Sexual Life-Styles >>
(by Money, John and Patricia Tucker. Sexual Signatures: What it Means to be a Man or a Woman)
The pioneers of new sexual life-styles see their explorations as attempts to escape hypocrisy, as a search for the integrity without which living is a burden. Conservatives see the pioneering as a threat to integrity, an attack not only on society but on their own sense of themselves as men and women. In all the camps there is the lurking fear that changes in the definition of manhood and womanhood may destroy the precious differences between the sexes, turning us all into either sexless zombies or ambisexual acrobats.
The reason so many people react to sexual pioneering as if it were a personal attack is the constant interaction between individual and society that sustains both. Cultural stereotypes, including the gender stereotypes — society’s definition of what it means to be a man or a woman — are the glue that holds a society together. They embody the general agreements that enable a group of people to cooperate. Without a language stereotype, for example, a general agreement on the meaning assigned to a vast number of combinations of sounds, there could be no common language. Gender stereotypes embody the general agreement on the roles assigned to men and women, boys and girls. They are the matrix within which your own personal concepts of what it means to be a person who is a man or a woman — your gender schemas — took shape. Wherever your schema fits into the stereotype, you gain support from society for your sense of identity, and by the same token a change in the stereotype jars your sense of yourself. The severity of the jolt depends on how rigid your schemas are. Like your backbone, they must be rigid enough to support you, but flexible enough so that you can maneuver. The best trade-off between rigidity and flexibility depends on what you want to do, how much support you need, and what kinds of jolts you must absorb.
Your gender schemas are the framework of your gender identity/role. There are very few technical terms in this book, but “gender identity” and “gender role” must be understood. The terms were introduced so recently that not everyone understands them the same way (for a historical account, see Money, 1973). Gender identity, as described above, is your sense of yourself as male or female. Gender role is everything that expresses this sense of yourself as male or female. Gender role includes everything you feel and think, everything you do and say, that indicates — to yourself as well as to others — that you are male or female. Gender identity and gender role are not two different things; they are different aspects of the same thing, like the proverbial two sides of a coin. Your gender identity is the inward experience of your gender role; your gender role is the expression of your gender identity.* The term “gender identity/role” emphasizes this unity.
* Official definitions (Money and Ehrhardt, 1972):
Gender Identity: The sameness, unity, and persistence of one’s Individuality as male, female, or ambivalent, in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behavior; gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public expression of gender identity.
Gender Role: Everything that a person says and does, to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male, or female, or ambivalent; it includes but is not restricted to sexual arousal and response; gender role is the public expression of gender identity, and gender identity is the private experience of gender role.
While your gender identity/role conforms more or less to the cultural stereotype for your sex, it also reflects the
biographical events of your own life, your body, and your personality, just as the language you use conforms more or less to the cultural language stereotype but also reflects your physical structure, the circumstances under which you learned to talk, where and how you grew up, and your personality. The continual interaction between society and the individual constantly causes some degree of modification on both sides.
Growing up is mainly a matter of shaping up to fit into a society, a vital process since none of us could survive very long as members of no society. If its cultural stereotypes are too rigid, the society stunts its members and stagnation sets in, for rigid stereotypes can maim as severely and as permanently as foot-binding maimed previous generations of Chinese women. But if the stereotypes are too amorphous, the society fails to provide its members with the necessary means of cooperation and soon falls apart. The tendency of cultural stereotypes to resist change is essential for maintaining a society, but flexibility is essential to maintain both the society and its members in health. The societal challenge is to achieve stereotypes that are strong enough to support cooperation but flexible enough to allow for individual development. Those who are outraged by pioneering in new life-styles are reacting on two levels: there’s the fear that weakening the stereotypes will cause society to collapse, and the fear that radical change in the stereotypes will leave their own sense of identity without adequate support.
As a starting point for the road map, take the gender stereotypes of our not too distant past. There’s no generally accepted definitive description of them, but by and large, the main body of American society accepted, through most of its history, that —
If you are a man:
• You may fight but not cry.
• You must strive to outdo your fellow man, never admitting defeat.
• You may seduce girls to prove your manliness, but are entitled to a virgin bride.
• You may do any work, even the most menial, outside of your home without damage to your pride, but you don’t undertake the cooking, cleaning, or laundering at home, or the day-to-day care of your children. (In a domestic emergency you cope, but perform even the simplest domestic chore sloppily to advertise that it is alien to you.)
• You take financial responsibility for supporting the women and children in your immediate family; your wife can perhaps go out to work if she wants to, but her real job is at home.
• You may show affection for your wife and small children, but not for anyone else and most particularly not for another man; if you want to show a man that you love him, you make a mock attack — slap him on the back, shove, or lunge at him.
• All your relations with women are strongly colored by sex, and the significant ones are those limited to sex.
• You brag about the fun and bawdy lustfulness of sex in any all-male group, and use a special prudish vocabulary with women, even your wife and any other sex partner.
If you are a woman:
• You’re a failure unless you marry and have children.
• Until you marry, your job is to compete (not too openly) with other women for the attention of men and ta hang onto your hymen, but it’s unbecoming to show overt interest in a man until he has signified interest in you.
• After you marry, your job is to be a good wife and mother, and to pay no attention to other men ( “good” is defined not in terms of your own performance, but by the well-being of your husband and children or their regard for you ).
• Wile and guile are your weapons, manipulation is your tactic; you’re not expected to have a strategy or to be consistent, but if your inconsistency — or your children — cause problems, it’s your fault.
• You read and write, but not too much of either, and even less of math.
• If you earn a little money, that’s great, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your homework, but to surpass your husband or his colleagues in any kind of achievement outside of the domestic sphere puts everybody in grave psychological peril.
• Your sexual feelings are not very important; it’s not nice to think or talk about them.
Although they’ve been crumbling for years, these stereotypes have by no means lost their grip. To some Americans, they are still gospel, to others they are quaint, but their influence still reaches deep into the lives of us all.
World War II marked a kind of watershed for gender stereotypes. In the late 1960s, rebellious American youth adopted as a tenet of its credo “You can’t trust anybody over thirty.” There’s nothing magic about the age of thirty, but in the late sixties it had the special significance that anyone who was then over thirty had been born before World War II. That war severely jolted the gender stereotypes by force-feeding to millions of young men drafted into the armed forces the knowledge that they were not biologically unqualified to cook, clean, and launder for themselves or for others, and taught even more millions of young women that a job and fat paycheck did not make them unfeminine. Rosie the Riveter was a folk heroine, and women who wore uniforms, even those with bars or oak leaves on their shoulders, had no trouble getting dates and wedding rings. The members of that generation had consolidated their concepts of manhood and womanhood long before the war, however, and when peace came and prosperity prevailed, they reverted to the living patterns of their childhood with a rush. The result was an orgy of exaggerated domesticity that produced the phenomenal postwar baby boom. But the shock had jarred loose the glue of gender stereotype, and the children whose basic concepts of manhood and womanhood were formed after that war have grown up with a far more flexible idea of what it is to be a man or a woman. Already there are signs that the children of those children are even less concerned than their parents with arbitrary gender role distinctions, a striking demonstration of progressive interaction between stereotypes and individual schemas.
The accelerating rate of change during the past few decades has made the inevitable gaps between individuals, between the sexes, and between generations so uncomfortably wide that cooperation has suffered. But while the gaps that separate the sexes from each other have been widening, gender research has been finding out more and more about how those gaps opened up and how they can be narrowed. This book examines sex differences in the light of the new findings. It traces your course from the start of your life to show the anatomical turnings that steered you toward manhood or womanhood, the way you put together your concepts of what men and .women are, and the interaction of the factors that influenced you at each stage of your sexual development in their historical, cultural, and biographical context. With such a map you can see where you are now and what options are open to both you and society in adapting to the changes that are now taking place.
Much of the new insight into the ancient processes of sexual differentiation is coming from the handful of gender identity clinics now in operation. If you’ve never heard of a gender identity clinic, you are not alone. It wasn’t until 1966 that the first gender identity clinic in the world officially opened its doors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. There, and at a dozen other such clinics that have since been established, specialists in a number of different fields — psychology, psychiatry, sociology, genetics, endocrinology, embryology, and surgery — have teamed up so that the full force of modem science can be brought to bear on sexual differentiation problems and research.
At Johns Hopkins Hospital there are the Gender Identity Clinic, where transexuals and transvestites are treated, and the Psychohormonal Research Unit. Patients seen in the Psychohormonal Research Unit are children with defects of the sex organs and homosexuals, as well as transexuals and transvestites, including those who are being treated in the Gender Identity Clinic.
The labels “transexual,” “transvestite,” and “homosexual” designate points on the spectrum between stereotypic male and female sexual behavior. They are often lumped together in people’s minds, and while it’s true that there is some overlap in the areas between the points, you can learn more about normal sexual differentiation by considering them separately.
One source of confusion is that the human mind finds it convenient to perceive by contrast. Bipolar thinking is probably the most primitive form of logical thought, and people talk glibly of light or dark, hot or cold, good or bad, male or female, alive or dead, and so forth, as if there were a sharp dividing line between them. Everybody knows that reality consists of infinite shadings along a spectrum between imagined absolutes, but bipolar thinking is useful, so we use it. The mistake is to forget that the absolutes, if they exist at all, are quite outside human experience, and that any dividing line is largely a matter of context. The same water can be too hot (for bathing) and too cold (for sterilizing); the same illumination can be too light (for sleeping) and too dark (for reading); and shooting somebody can get you jailed or decorated as circumstances determine whether it was a good or a bad act. Just when a person can be pronounced dead is a very serious problem, especially in modem organ-transplant surgery, and one that has not yet been solved. Only the extremes are easy to classify, leaving large fuzzy areas in between.
Abandoning bipolar thinking, you might take dark as a base and think of something — light — being added to it in varying degrees, or you might take fight as a base and define dark in terms of decreasing fight, and the same for hot and cold. You can think of human nature as grounded in original sin, with something — goodness — added in varying degrees, or you could start with pristine goodness and think of evil as the something that is added.
When it comes to male and female, the Bible tells of Adam as the base with something — a rib — taken away to make Eve. In the light of modern research you might take Eve as the base and think of something — male hormone — added to make Adam, or you could keep Adam as the base with something — again male hormone — decreased to make Eve. We have adopted the Eve base view, and will refer to the something that must be added for male differentiation as the Adam principle. In the sexual differentiation road map, the Adam principle is a recurrent feature, as you will see.
When it comes to sexual behavior, the bipolar fiction of what is masculine and what is feminine posits a purely heterosexual man and woman on one side of the dividing line, and an equally imaginary purely homosexual man and woman — pure transexuals — on the other side. In reality, people are infinitely varied along the spectrum in between, all capable of bisexual behavior. In fact, it is safe to say that every adult human being has, in fantasy, engaged in some form of bisexual behavior, if not physical contact, to some degree at some time in his or her life. “Ambisexual” describes the human race more accurately than “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” or even “bisexual,” although the degree of ambisexuality varies in intensity from one person to the next.
A group that many people find especially frightening is the bisexuals. These are people who see no reason to confine their erotic interest to the members of only one sex. They seek freedom to expand their expressions of friendship with members of both sexes to include close body contact and sexual relations. They may alternate between a sex partner who is male and one who is female (episodic homosexuality) or engage in sex play with a man and a woman or with a larger mixed group at the same time. It would be more accurate to call them ambisexuals.
The size of this group and its growth potential are impossible to estimate. While it’s true that we all start out ambisexual, our culture has so rigidly proscribed ambisexuality for so long that the gate of erotic interest has undoubtedly locked tight in one direction or the other for some proportion of the adults in our society. There is ample reason to believe, however, that this gate would stay open if encouraged by the cultural stereotypes, as it did in ancient Greece. Furthermore, there is evidence that the gate can close without locking so that the direction of erotic interest can be reversed, as is done in cultures like that of the Batak people of Lake Toba of Sumatra and the Marind Amin headhunters of southern New Guinea. These cultures that have been studied are alive and well in the world today and appear to be remarkably free of obligatory adult homosexuality.
The people of these cultures are ambisexual in stages — homosexual in adolescence, heterosexual as adults — as prescribed by their traditions. A period of homosexuality is prescribed for adolescent boys as a standard part of the growing-up process and preparation for manhood. In these cultures, which have endured successfully for centuries, the homosexual period is followed by heterosexual marriage which is universal. Their marriages are far more stable than in our own society, couples settle easily into the heterosexual life-style, and furthermore, researchers could find no adult obligative homosexuals in either culture.
In our own society, women have much more freedom than men to express their feelings of friendship and affection for members of their own sex in close body contact (but not sexual relations). While there is not yet enough evidence to support a conclusion, what evidence has been gathered indicates that among the swingers who have been initiated into homosexual contacts, the women find it easier to accept such contacts than the men.
There is plenty of evidence that bisexual group sex can be as personally satisfying as a paired partnership provided each participant is “tuned in” on the same wave length. This might not be easy to achieve, since known bisexuals are nearly always more attracted to partners of one sex than of the other. The ratio of attraction to men and women may be 60:40, say, or 25:75, but only in a very few instances is it 50:50. And the possibility that an ambisexual will fall equally in love with two people, a man and a woman, in a threesome relationship, seems to be extremely remote.
Before anyone could say whether or not all humans are capable of developing a bisexual gender identity/role and giving it bisexual erotic expression, an entire generation would have to grow up in a society that openly sanctioned, practiced, and taught by example bisexual love. That would be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you feel about the fellowship of humankind, but it’s hardly likely to happen here in the next few generations.
You as an individual must, of course, protect the nuclear core of your gender schemas. You can, however, distinguish between the nuclear core and the flexible part, and keep your schemas as flexible as possible. You can remind yourself that except for the basic four, the core parts of your schemas, which you yourself cannot afford to decode, are not divinely ordained eternal verities; they differentiated over a period of years in the interaction between your-particular nature and your particular nurture, which may be similar to but are not identical with those of the rest of your society. Sexual behavior that would be destructive for you is not necessarily wrong for your neighbor.
You can temper your attitude toward your fellow men and women with tolerance, recognizing that relaxation of the gender stereotypes offers you the chance to enjoy life more not just as a man or a woman, but as the special kind of man or woman that you are and can be.
More than ever before in human history, we today can afford to relate to each other as human beings and as individuals instead of strictly as males and females. To the extent that we can broaden our human schemas and prune our gender schemas back, sex differences will flourish in far greater variety. Far from blurring the differences between the sexes, freeing ourselves from stale, repetitive, artificially imposed patterns of difference will allow the real differences to emerge. The more of his individual self a man can develop without having to question his masculinity, the more of her individual self a woman can develop without having to question her femininity, the more of a person each can be, and the more fully they can complement and enhance each other. Surely there’s no joy in a prescribed response to another individual that compares with the joy of discovering one’s own unique ability to complement and enhance one’s unique partner. There are glorious possibilities of manhood and womanhood to be explored beyond the stereotypic “If you’re a man you must” and “If you’re a woman you must” barriers that the accelerating rate of change and the sexual revolution are sweeping away.
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