Straight Read Free Page B

whether one behaves heterosexually or homosexually sometimes seems like little more than a matter of circumstance. Does the experienceof situational homosexuality fundamentally change whether a person is heterosexual or “normal-sexual”? Unsurprisingly, the answers are all over the map, as are the explanations for why a phenomenon like situational homosexuality should exist in the first place.
    Despite the fact that most of us use the term “heterosexual” with enormous (and cavalier!) certainty, there seems to be no aspect of “heterosexual” for which a truly iron-clad definition has been established. There seems to be general agreement that “heterosexual” has to do with men and women and the approved sorts of sexual, emotional, social, familial, and economic attractions and activities that might go on between them, but the overall picture is ambiguous and the details change depending on who you ask and when in time you look. There is a Heisenbergian quality about defining “heterosexual”: the more precisely the term is being defined, the more likely it is that the term is only being defined by the lights of a single moment in time and space.
    Similarly telling in their grand and vexing ambiguities are two other things we inevitably talk about when we talk about heterosexuality: gender and sex, both in the sense of “having sex” and in terms of biology.
    â€œTo have sex” can mean lots of things. It might mean “to be a creature with a biological sex.” Or it could mean “to be gendered,” as in “androgynous fashions,” “male pipe fittings,” “chick flicks.” It can mean having a libido, in the sense of “oversexed” or “undersexed,” or simply having genitals, as when we refer to the vulva and all its parts as “a woman’s sex.” Colloquially, we most often use it to mean “to engage in sexual activity,” but what this in turn denotes is alas far from clear. It could simply mean “to engage in erotic activity,” but it could as easily mean “to engage in penis-in-vagina penetration,” “to attempt to procreate,” or “to engage in erotic activity leading to orgasm.” Any, or indeed all, of these things could be true and relevant when talking about heterosexuality. This is why we can’t assume that “having sex” only means one thing, even if we’re operating on the assumption that we’re talking about sexual activity between partners of different biological sexes. Only one of the many sex acts of which our species is capable, after all, requires the simultaneous engagement of both a penis and a vagina.
    When it comes to “sex,” context is king: its three tiny letters wear an awful lot of hats. This is true even within fairly narrow and strict-seemingfields, such as biology. The thing we call “biological sex” is the diagnosis of physical sex made according to the observation of bodily characteristics, and also the constellation of bodily characteristics that are observed to make that diagnosis. The late Johns Hopkins sexologist John Money identified seven different criteria for a diagnosis of biological sex in humans, including genetic or chromosomal sex, internal anatomy, external anatomy, sex hormones, and the type of gonads an individual possesses. This is extremely useful, as it emphasizes the very real possibility that in any given individual, these criteria will not all necessarily point to the same diagnosis. Sex chromosome anomalies, “ambiguous” genitalia that in some way or other blur the difference between male- and female-typical genitals, hormone levels that are far from textbook, and gonads that are somewhere between ovary and testis are all fairly common and naturally occurring.
    There is little agreement, however, about how these atypical biologies should be identified. Nor is there consensus