Loading the Dice: Bisexuality and Choice
In the various and sundry debates about gay rights, the question of whether sexual orientation is a choice comes up with almost irritating predictability. And when it does, one of the things I’ve noticed is that bisexuality — as it so often does — gets completely ignored.
So I want to talk a little about bisexuality, sexual orientation, and choice.
Because, speaking as a bisexual person, in my experience I do have something of a choice.
Of course it’s true that I don’t have a choice about who I’m sexually attracted to. And I didn’t have a choice about who I fell in love with. I don’t choose that, any more than anyone else does. But back when I was dating, I did have a choice about who I dated and who I socialized with. At the time that I fell for Ingrid, I was dating women, and socializing in the lesbian community, a whole lot more than I was with men and in the hetero community. And I was doing it out of choice.
On the whole, I like women more than men. Sexually I like both roughly the same (with something of a preference for women on the whole, but with that preference varying a lot over the years). But personally, emotionally, I tend to like women better than men. Not as friends necessarily — I have plenty of male friends — but as romantic partners. The personality traits that, in my experience, women tend to have more than men — cooperation, empathy, emotional expressiveness, good listening skills, yada yada yada — are traits that I like, and traits that I find central to a good relationship.
Now, of course, that’s a generalization, and a very broad one at that. Not all women are like that, and plenty of men are. And if I’d happened to meet and fall for a man who was cooperative and empathetic and expressive and a good listener etc., then that would have been just ducky. But back when I was dating, dating women just seemed to make more sense. It was the smart way of playing the odds. It was loading the dice.
And it works the other way, too. I’ve known other bisexuals who date and socialize more heterosexually — again out of choice.
It is, IMO, one of the differences between being bisexual and being monosexual (hetero- or homosexual). You can, in theory, be happy being sexual and romantic with someone of either gender . . . and so you have at least some degree of choice about which gender you get involved with. Indeed, if your relationship preference is very strong indeed, you can actually flat-out refuse to get involved with potential partners of one gender or the other, even if your libido or your heart is temporarily pulling you towards them . . . and unlike homosexual people who refuse to accept their homosexuality, you can still have a happy and satisfying sexual and romantic life. And even if you don’t go that far, you can still generally date and socialize with the gender and the community you’d prefer to end up with. You can’t choose who you get the hots for . . . but you can hang out with the kind of people you’d be happy to hook up with if lightning strikes. You can load the dice.
So when I hear people defend gay rights by saying, “Of course it’s not a choice, who would choose to be queer, who would choose to be oppressed and vilified and discriminated against?”, my reaction is to raise my hand and say, “Me. Over here. I would.” Of course I’d rather not be oppressed, etc. — but even with all of those drawbacks, I’d still choose to be queer. And I’d still choose to be in a queer relationship. I did.
And this is a big part of the reason that I think the “choice” issue is a red herring in the gay rights debates. After all, you could argue that pedophiles don’t choose to be attracted to children, and still think it’s profoundly immoral to act on that attraction. The important question in the gay rights debates is not whether being queer is a choice, but whether there’s any reason whatsoever to think that being queer is harmful. And by now, the evidence is overwhelming that it is not. Whether it’s a choice or not is irrelevant. It is still, flatly and unequivocally, none of anybody else’s damn business.
I developed these ideas in a discussion thread on Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Thanks, Ed.
This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Friday, 4 April 2008 at 4:23 pm Eclectic wrote:
I still think it’s a good argument.
Brief detour: I don’t much like how pedophiles are made out to be huge bogeyman. Is it unethical to act on the impulse to the extent of watching anime porn? I knew a rather nice woman who made pocket money at the age of 12 flashing men. It didn’t seem to bother her any. Somehow it’s all one giant slippery slope to raping babies and I’m not sure I buy that any more than liking thrill sports is an inevitable path to suicide, or liking bondage is an inevitable path to autoerotic asphyxiation.
But back to the point. While “it doesn’t affect you enough for you to stick your nose in” is quite true, that’s a weaker position, because it does affect other people a little bit, and you have to argue degrees. (Or are you going to argue that gay social clubs plus the attitude that “condoms are for breeders” doesn’t have public health implications?)
Simply as a rhetorical argument, “could you choose to be homosexual?” is an excellent way to get through to Kinsey-zeros. It makes the point that even if they consider it undesirable behaviour, it needs to be treated as a disability and not a moral failing. Which, even if you don’t agree that it’s a disability, is an improvement on fag-bashing.
Now, there is a small weakness to that argument in that apparently for a lot of virulent homophobes, it is a choice; they feel homosexual attractions and are denying them. But it still works as an argument because they are denying them. And honest straights are a majority in the world.
Me, I equate it to being left-handed. The numbers (about 10%) for left-handed and homosexual are even roughly comparable. And left-handedness used to be considered seriously wrong; these days it’s something that celebrity gossip rags often don’t bother printing.
I agree that this leaves bisexual people out, and I’m sorry; ambidextrous people do exist. But I think that’s a subtlety we can get to after we get past “fags are evil”.
on Tuesday, 8 April 2008 at 12:02 pm Erynn wrote:
I think a better argument can and should be made (loudly and often) that religion is a choice, yet it is illegal to discriminate against people due to the religion that they choose to practice. If we are not allowed to discriminate regarding religion then we should not be able to discriminate about sexual choices. Certainly the typical kinds of arguments that people choosing not to practice certain religions (like, say, fundamentalist Christianity) are evil are the same ones often used against people whose sexuality doesn’t fit into the “normal” heterosexual box.
“If it’s against my religion it’s immoral” is never a good argument, and that’s the basis of pretty much every argument against same-sex attractions and relationships that I’ve seen. Let’s call this what it is and stop with the “genetic” arguments of “we have no choice.”
on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 at 1:57 pm Foxglove wrote:
Wow… I loved your article.
It really made me think.
I like how you point out that the struggle for equality should not focus on whether someone chose to be queer, but that there is nothing wrong with being queer… I agree.
on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 at 9:32 pm Knightman wrote:
You were doing just fine until your last sentence.
The last sentence is really what all the fuss is about.
If you “choose” to dye your hair purple and paint yellow polka dots on your face…you should certainly be aware of the consequences of people reacting to such a queer image. And when persons react to that queer image, the purple-headed one should NOT run to the courts and demand special rights, privileges, laws, and try to overturn time-honored traditions.
So….it IS the business of the “non-queer” population when the gay/lesbian community starts lobbying the court system, demanding special treatment and laws, and overturning time honored traditions such as marriage and trying to force their beliefs as being “acceptable” upon us.
on Saturday, 19 April 2008 at 11:06 pm Sara wrote:
Knightman, please explain how two guys getting married to each other specifically endangers your marriage.
Equal rights are not “special treatment.” Nobody is trying to “force” you to do anything.
Human beings deserve human rights, period, end of sentence. You don’t have to like it, but you are going to have to deal with it.
on Thursday, 1 May 2008 at 3:58 pm [Greta Christina] Jealousy, Friendship, and Bisexual Chopped Liver | Blowfish Blog wrote:
[…] And this assumption leads to some truly convoluted errors in logic. I recently wrote about an example of this here in this blog, about how the “Is sexual orientation a choice?” debates almost always ignore bisexuals . . . since even if bisexuals are born bisexual, we still have some degree of choice about which direction to take our lives in. And the bisexual wars in the lesbian community led to my favorite piece of Alice in Wonderland political logic ever: “The lesbians will decide who is a lesbian.” […]
on Wednesday, 11 June 2008 at 10:56 am Loading The Dice: Bisexuality And Choice | OUTLOUD wrote:
[…] This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog. […]