The Blowfish Blog

[Greta Christina] The Case of the Missing Bisexual

Harebrained speculation time:

Why aren’t there more “true” bisexuals? (”True” in quotation marks — so please don’t all start yelling at me.)

One of the interesting puzzles about sexual orientation is the way it’s distributed in the population. It’s very far from a neat bell curve, with a few heterosexuals and homosexuals at either end, and a big peak in the bisexual middle. It’s not even a slanty bell curve, peaking sharply at “more or less heterosexual” and sloping down gradually towards “more or less homosexual.”

Instead, it’s a double bell curve — with one peak near “leaning towards straight,” and another, smaller peak near “leaning towards gay.” (The height and shape and location of these peaks vary depending on who’s doing the study . . . but the basic “double bell curve with one high peak and one low” pattern seems to hold pretty steady.)

Translation: Very few people are strictly straight or strictly gay . . . but most people do have something of a preference for one gender or the other. Quote unquote “true” bisexuals, people who are attracted to women and men equally, are fairly rare. Even if we take self-identification out of the picture — even if we define orientation purely on the basis of desire or behavior — we still see this tendency.

Why would this be?

If sexual orientation were entirely genetic — if there were some evolutionary reason for humans to be more heterosexual than not but to have some fluidity around that — why would we have the double peaks? Wouldn’t we just have the slanty bell curve, peaking around 1 or 1.5 on the 0-to-6 Kinsey scale, and gradually curving down towards 6? Why would we have a small second peak at around 4.5 or 5?

I freely acknowledge that there might be some good genetic reason for this “double bell curve” phenomenon, one that we just don’t know yet. I’ll even acknowledge that there might be some good genetic reason for this phenomenon, one that somebody else knows but that I don’t. I’m definitely not a sexual orientation constructionist (translation: person who thinks orientation is entirely constructed by society). The science is still shaking out, but it does seem to be pointing to genetics as at least a significant factor in determining which gender or genders we like to boff. And it might well turn out that genetics play an important role in this “double peak” pattern.

But I’ll also say this:

I think it’s quite plausible that the double peak is entirely cultural.

And there are two specific cultural trends that I think may be skewing our orientations towards the two peaks.

The first is homophobia . . . and the way it’s sorted our culture into Straight and Gay. The two mix and overlap, of course — straight people have gay friends, and vice versa — but they’re still distinct social categories. Especially in parts of the country and the world that are more homophobic. Because of homophobia, people who lean towards being queer have a strong need to create a gay culture, a community shaped around sexual and romantic desire towards people of the same sex. And of course, because of homophobia, straight people have historically shunned queers — and have denied any queer tendencies in themselves. This has improved dramatically, but it’s only improved fairly recently, and it does still go on today.

So because society has sorted itself into two intermingling but distinct groups — Gay and Straight — people somewhere in the middle often feel a need to pick one. There is a bisexual community, but it’s nowhere near as visible, or as well-organized, as either the straight or gay worlds. And it can be very hard to drift back and forth between those two worlds. People whose natural orientations lie close to the middle of the scale — say, a 2.5 or 3.5 on the scale of 0 to 6 — often wind up picking a side, and more or less sticking to it.

And that tendency can be self-perpetuating. A cultural preference for straight society or the gay community can slant your sexual preference towards women over men, or vice versa. I know that I tend to get more interested in women when I’m spending more time in dyke culture, and I get more interested in men when I’m hanging around straight people more. It’s a simple matter of who’s on my mind. Not to mention who’s available. Love the one you’re with, and all that. Or lust after the one you’re with, anyway.

So that’s Harebrained Speculation Number One for the double peak.

Harebrained Speculation Number Two: Biphobia.

There’s a strong bias against bisexuals in both straight and gay cultures. Gay culture tends to see bisexuals as traitors, fence-sitters, kinky thrill-seekers, people who can’t commit either politically or personally. Straight society tends to see bisexuals as fickle, unreliable, secretly gay people who just can’t admit it. Plus straights often see us as promiscuous . . . and, of course, in the age of AIDS, they see us as vectors of disease. And both gays and straights tend to see us as confused, experimenting, “going through a phase.”

All of which exacerbates people’s tendency to sort into gay or straight culture. The strong biases against bisexuality — from both gays and straights — push many people to pick one camp or the other . . . people who might not otherwise need or want to. People who might have identified as bisexual can internalize this biphobia, and decline to call themselves bi. And people who privately identify as bi are often reluctant to do so publicly.

So largely because of homophobia from the straight world, we have a tendency to sort ourselves into straight society and the gay community. Because of biphobia from both straight and gay cultures, this tendency gets exaggerated. And this cultural tendency gets transformed into personal sex behavior and desire . . . which then turns into a self-perpetuating feedback loop. Hence, the “double peak” pattern in our sexual orientations — a pattern that might be much less pronounced, and might not even be there at all, if these social trends weren’t there.

I’m not sure how you’d test this hypothesis. But here’s what I’d expect to see if it were true:

If it were true, then in parts of the world that were less homophobic — and less biphobic — I’d expect to see a less vividly pronounced double peak. (If the less-homophobic, less-biphobic trend had been happening for long enough, anyway.)

And if it were true, then if society continues to become less homophobic — and less biphobic — over the coming decades, I’d also expect to see the strong double peaks soften and flatten towards a more standard slanty bell curve.

It might not flatten out entirely. Again, there may be some genetic reasons for the double peak in the bell curve, ones that we don’t know about. And even in an entirely non-homophobic, non-biphobic society, we still might have something of a cultural tendency to sort into gay and straight cultures. For dating/ cruising purposes if nothing else. But I think without these cultural factors, this double peak would very likely flatten out significantly.

I’m not saying “everyone is basically bisexual.” I think that’s bullshit. Some people are clearly not bisexual. Some people are clearly gay or straight. And even though most people do have at least some capacity to be attracted to both/all genders, that still doesn’t make them “basically bisexual.” Sexual identity is complicated — it’s about political identity, cultural identity, sexual history, romantic and relationship preferences, etc., as well as basic sexual attraction. And when people are deciding which identity (if any) works best for them, they get to decide for themselves which of these factors gets priority. I don’t want someone insisting that I’m “basically lesbian” because I’m currently hovering around 5 on the Kinsey scale — so I’m not going to insist that someone else is “basically bisexual” because they’re currently hovering around 4.

So I’m not saying “everyone is basically bisexual.” I’m saying that, at least for those of us in the wide sloppy middle of the Kinsey scale, sexual orientation is at least somewhat malleable. Like I wrote in my recent piece here, The Learned Fetish, the finer points of our sexual desires can be shaped by our experiences as adults — even if the basic outlines are set early on.

I’m not sure why I think this is important. I’m not sure the answer would have any effect in figuring out social policy or political strategy or dating strategy, or any other practical decisions we might make about sex. I’m even not sure that it is important, except that figuring out what is and isn’t true about reality is always important.

But I sure do think it’s interesting.

So what do you think? If you lean more towards one end of the Kinsey scale, do you think you might lean more towards the middle if society weren’t so divided into Gay and Straight? And if you’re already pretty squarely in the middle, do you think you’d have had an easier time getting there if it weren’t for the two camps?

Greta Christina, copyright © 2009. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.

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[Greta Christina] Tears

As promised last week: my exegesis on crying in spanking porn, and what makes it so hot.

I was writing last week about acquired tastes in sexual fetishes. I was writing about how being repeatedly exposed to certain images in porn can inspire you to pick up a fetish — not a true, clinical, “can’t get off without it” fetish, but a more casual, peripheral, “I really like to do this/ see this in my porn/ think about this when I whack off” fetish. I was giving, as an example of one of these pornographic tropes that I’ve acquired as a personal fetish, crying. Specifically, crying in spanking porn.

And I started wondering:

What’s that about?

Other standard tropes of spanking porn make more obvious sense to me. The classic implements, the classic outfits, the classic roles being played — they’re mostly pretty straightforward, and they don’t take an expert in semiotics or psychology to analyze where they come from and why people find them hot.

But the crying trope is, at least on the face of it, a little more unsettling. It’s the sort of thing that rabid anti-porn activists point to when they’re trying to prove that all porn actresses are forced into the business, either by financial hardship or at gunpoint. I mean, if the actress in a spanking porno is dressed as an underaged schoolgirl . . . well, even if you find the fantasy disturbing, you can always remember that this is adults consensually playing out a fantasy they both enjoy, and not actual child abuse. But if the actress or actor is actually crying, the line between “acting out a fantasy” and “genuinely upset” is a whole lot more blurry.

And it occurred to me:

That’s the point.

The point is that it’s real.

Crying in spanking porn is like cum shots in regular porn.

Not in the sense of “a trope that’s become so ubiquitous it’s now just part of the background noise.” That’s not what I mean. It isn’t. (I actually wish it were a little more ubiquitous, since I find it really hot.)

Crying is like cum shots because it’s proof that what’s happening is real. It’s proof, not only that the actors are physically engaging in the sexual acts they’re portraying, but that they’re feeling them.

There are lots of analyses out there about why cum shots are so ubiquitous in porn; why heterosexual men are so fixated on watching other men ejaculate, to the point where they won’t be satisfied with porn unless they see it. But the most convincing analysis I’ve seen is that the cum shot is proof that the male actor was really feeling it. It’s proof, not only that the sex was real, but that the sensations were real. (The man’s sensations, anyway — which is what hetero porn aimed at a male audience tends to prioritize.) It’s proof that the arousal, the excitement, and of course the orgasm, all felt real to the man having the sex. Which makes it easier for the male viewer to project himself into the fantasy.

And that’s what crying is in spanking porn.

I’ve seen plenty of spanking porn where the spankings themselves were obviously real — you could hear the sounds of the slaps, you could see the impacts and the reddening bottom — but where I had no idea whether the person on the receiving end felt anything at all about the matter. I’ve seen plenty of spanking porn where the recipient was so silent, so stiff, so unresponsive, that even with the sights and sounds of the smacks, I still had no idea whether the performer was feeling helpless, or defiant, or turned on, or anything at all except bored. The sights and sounds might as well have been done by special effects. The only reason I trust that they weren’t special effects is that special effects are a lot more expensive than just paying someone to get their butt smacked.

But if the recipient is crying . . . I know they’re feeling it. Not just that they’re feeling the physical sensations of skin or wood or leather striking their skin. I know they’re feeling it inside: the helplessness, the fear, the shame, the pain. The good stuff.

And that makes it easier for me to project myself into the fantasy. Regardless of whether I’m fantasizing about receiving the spanking or giving it. If I’m fantasizing about receiving it, and if the actress or actor is crying, I can project myself into their helplessness, their fear, their shame, their pain. I can feel these emotions and sensations myself. If it’s a really good video, I can practically feel the tears welling up in my own eyes. And if I’m fantasizing about giving it, I can project myself into how powerful it feels to make somebody else feel all this: to make someone else feel so helpless, so frightened, so ashamed, so much in pain, that I make them cry.

You know. The good stuff.

It is sometimes unsettling. If a spanking model is crying, then that means the fantasy of helplessness and fear and shame and so on have crossed over into some sort of real feelings of helplessness and fear and shame. And that can be a little unsettling to watch in a total stranger. If you’re the one who’s crossing that line, if you’re the one who’s experiencing these difficult emotions and who knows exactly how you eroticize them — or if it’s your lover or fuckbuddy or whatever, the person on the receiving end of your chastisements and whose blend of arousal and suffering you’re reasonably familiar with — that’s one thing. If it’s some spanking model you’ve never seen in your life . . . then that’s a little unnerving. It is to me, anyway.

But that unnerving quality — the place where fantasy crosses into reality, the place where pretend situations conjure real emotions, and where difficult emotions cross their wires with intense sexual arousal — that’s a huge part of what makes kinky sex interesting. To me, anyway. It’s a huge part of what I get out of my kinky sex life. It’s a huge part of what I think about in my kinky fantasies. And it’s a huge part of what I look for in my kinky porn.

And crying is what shows me that it’s real.

Greta Christina, copyright © 2009. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.

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[Greta Christina] The Learned Fetish

Can fetishes be acquired?

There’s a truism among many people who think and write about sex. It goes roughly like this: Sexual desires, including sexual fetishes, are developed early in life. And they don’t really change much. They can’t be changed by social pressure or changing conditions or the personal wish to get rid of them, and they aren’t subject to the whims of fashion. Not even fashions in porn. Porn caters to existing fetishes and desires — not the other way around.

I’ve been thinking about this truism. And I’m coming to the conclusion that it isn’t necessarily true.

Here’s my problem with this truism:

I have, in recent months and years, acquired some fetishes that I never had before.

Now, these aren’t full-blown fetishes in the standard sense. They aren’t a necessary component of my sexual arousal and satisfaction. I’m perfectly capable of enjoying sex without engaging in them or thinking about them; I’m perfectly capable of enjoying masturbation without fantasizing about them. (I do think that core sexual desires, such as being gay or more deeply rooted fetishes, aren’t very malleable; and unless it’s a fetish that non-consensually hurts other people, I don’t see any reason to try.)

But my new interests are fetishes in the less-standard sense. They occupy a significant portion of my erotic imagination. (Translated: I think about them a lot when I whack off.) I deliberately search for them in my porn, and fixate on them when I’m — ahem — enjoying my porn. And the sight or thought of them often sexually excites me, even if they’re not coming up in a sexual context.

Specifically — I know my readers, you don’t want to hear about this in the abstract, you want the dirty lascivious details, and I’m happy to oblige — I’ve acquired fetishes for many of the classic tropes of modern spanking porn. Hairbrushes. Belts. Schoolgirl uniforms. Helpless victims being spanked by cruel authority figures. Tears; i.e.. people, especially women, being spanked until they cry. (That’s a rich and strange topic, btw: one that deserves its own post and will get one soon.)

I’ve always enjoyed these objects and outfits and tropes. But in the past, they were only a few among many that I eroticized. They weren’t even at the top of the list. Some were high on that list . . . but they weren’t at the top. They are now.

Now, the fetish for spanking itself . . . that’s a lot closer to a classic fetish for me. It’s not an absolutely necessary component of my sexual arousal and pleasure. But while it’s not absolutely necessary, it’s pretty darned central. I think about spanking a lot. If I go for too long without it, I get cranky. A majority of my masturbation fantasies involve spanking to at least some extent. (I switch around a lot in my mind — from bottom to top, from girls to boys, from participant to voyeur, from cruel force to cheerful consent — but it’s a good bet that if I’m having a sex fantasy, somebody somewhere is getting spanked.) When I look for porn — porn purely to get myself off, not porn to expand my erotic horizons or satisfy my yen for literate sex writing — I generally look for spanking porn. And most of this has been true for most of my life.

But these specific spanking tropes? Not so much. They’re definitely an acquired taste. A learned fetish.

There’s little doubt in my mind where these fetishes were acquired. I watch a fair amount of standard modern spanking porn. (Mostly on SpankingTube — it’s free, and I’m broke.) These images are well-worn standards of standard modern spanking porn, cliches even, and I see them a lot. So my lizard hindbrain connects them with sex and orgasm generally; and my more complex and twisted human libido associates them with the erotic imagery it’s already aroused by. Duh.

But it’s still a little puzzling. After all, there are other standard tropes of modern spanking porn that haven’t grabbed my libido at all. I’m obsessed with hairbrushes and belts . . . but I’m pretty “Meh” about leather paddles and floggers that you’d get at a sex shop. (I like them fine in person, mind you; I just don’t fetishize them in my fantasies or my porn.) Schoolgirl uniforms and maidservant costumes send my libido up a tree . . . but trashy tramp-slut outfits just seem obvious and clumsy to me. I’m fascinated by helpless victims getting spanked against their will by cruel authority figures . . . but I’m a lot less interested in smart-mouthed brats getting righteously punished for their own good. I love white panties and black lace panties and boy-cut panties that curve up over the bottom of the butt . . . but I find thongs boring to the point of actual turn-off.

And I am almost entirely uninterested in standard female-dom/ male-submissive spanking porn. (Although part of that may be that femdom porn mostly caters to a male audience, and little attention is paid to seeing that the male submissive is reasonably attractive. If I’m going to fantasize about dominating a guy, and if I’m going to watch porn to spark those fantasies, I want the guy to be easy on the eyes. Or at least, not actually off-putting. But I digress.)

I guess to some extent, even my acquired fetishes still feed into the old ones. My newfound obsession with hairbrushes and belts feeds straight into my long-standing fetish for reality: for porn and fantasies that seem like they could easily be happening in an everyday sex life. My newfound obsession with white panties feeds straight into my long-standing fetish for the moment of the reveal, the moment — drawn out as long as possible — when a clothed erogenous zone is unclothed and put on display. My newfound obsession with shy, frightened schoolgirls caned by a sadistic schoolmaster/ mistress feeds straight into my long-standing fetish for the abuse of power. (Which may explain why the righteous punishment of brats doesn’t do it for me. For a punishment fantasy to work for me, there always has to be a fucked-up element of “I’m using my power over you to satisfy my perverse whims” underlying the pretense of “I’m disciplining you for your own good.”)

I am a bit conflicted about this. (Naturally. I swear, I’m not this conflicted and overthinking about my sex life all the time. I just don’t usually bother to write think pieces about aspects of my sexuality that I’m completely comfortable with. It lacks dramatic tension.) On the one hand, I’m not crazy about my personal libido being shaped to this degree by commercial video porn. Commercial video porn is all too often a quagmire of conventionality, misinformation, body fascism, and cliche piled on cliche piled on cliche. Even in low-budget, micro-marketed niche porn like spanking porn. Sometimes especially so. For the same reasons that I don’t want my tastes in food shaped by the mainstream food industry, I don’t want my tastes in sex shaped by the mainstream porn industry. Like I wrote in my recent piece on the ubiquity of pubic hair shaving, it bugs me no end that commercial porn has become a primary trendsetting influence on sexual culture. It’s just not a very good one.

But I do enjoy the degree to which my libido is malleable. It makes me feel open to new experiences. For the same reasons that I like learning about new music instead of just listening to the stuff I liked in my twenties, I like learning about new sexual fetishes instead of just enjoying the ones I liked in my twenties. And if I decide that I don’t like how my libido is being shaped by conventional spanking porn, I can always turn it off.

Anyway. It doesn’t ultimately matter; I’m fine with this however it turns out. But as always, I’m curious, and I’m nosy. So I’m wondering: Does anyone else have this experience? Has anyone else acquired new sexual fetishes later in life? And if so, have your newly-acquired fetishes mostly fed into existing ones . . . or have they opened up entirely different erotic avenues? Nosy minds want to know.

Greta Christina, copyright © 2009. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.

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[Greta Christina] 101 Positions That Won’t Spice Up Your Sex Life

If you’ve been around the sex world much, you’ve probably seen this sort of sex advice book a lot. “101 Sex Positions for Intrepid Couples.” “50 Peppery Positions for a Spicy Sex Life.” “(X) Number of Incendiary Positions to Heat Up the Bedroom.” They’re generally illustrated with erotic- but- tasteful, just- short- of- explicit photographs of well-groomed couples displaying the positions in question. The books are pretty much interchangeable, and the gist of all of them seems to be the same: If you’re a couple whose sex life is becoming monotonous and routine, the way to bring back the spark is variety. And the way to bring variety into a sex life is to have sex in a wide assortment of different positions.

Now. I have a whole passel of problems with these books. For starters, I hate how obsessed they are with penile-vaginal intercourse. The authors of these books seem to think that introducing variety into a sex life means finding 101 different ways to position male and female bodies together to make their genitals interlock. You’ll get a couple/few oral positions thrown in there; maybe a little anal if it’s one of the freakier books. But there’s little recognition of the wide world of sexual possibility that lives outside Man-Part Goes Inside Woman-Part. And there’s virtually no recognition of the fact that, for most women, intercourse by itself isn’t enough to get them off.

Which brings me to my next critique: I hate the way these books equate “sexual variety” with “physical variety.” Of course I agree that variety is an essential key to keeping a sex life happy and satisfying over the long haul. Almost every sex writer on the face of the planet agrees with that. I have yet to read a sex writer who says, “In order to keep the spark alive in your sex life, be sure to have sex in exactly the same way — the same place, the same position, the same time of day, the same day of the week — for the rest of your lives.”

But sexual variety can mean so much more than rotating your bodies in different configurations before inserting Prong A into Slot B. And these books seem blind to these possibilities. They hardly ever talk about erogenous zones outside the obvious ones. They hardly ever talk about dirty talk, dirty outfits, foreplay (or, as we dykes like to call it, “sex”), sex toys, slowing things down, speeding things up, role-playing . . . all that good stuff.

And they almost entirely ignore the crux of any good relationship, sexual or otherwise: communication. Talking about desires, talking about fantasies, talking about the outfits and the toys and the dirty talk and the slowing things down, not to mention actual communication skills — how to ask, how to listen, how to negotiate, how to set limits, how to move forward together with experiments — little or none of this gets included in the discussion of how to bring variety into your sex life.

Even when they do talk about this stuff, it’s no more than a cursory, “get it out of the way” mention before getting on to the important business of describing and demonstrating the Double Reverse Astronaut Position. These books might as well be titled, “101 Ways to Have the Exact Same Sex You’ve Been Having, But With Your Bodies Arranged Somewhat Differently.”

And that — especially the part about communication — leads me to my final and most important critique of these “101 Ways to Have Penile-Vaginal Intercourse” books:

If you don’t already have a happy sex life, new sex positions by themselves are unlikely to make things better.

I was inspired to write this piece (or reminded that I wanted to write it) by a piece in Dr. Marty Klein’s excellent blog, Sexual Intelligence. In this piece, Dr. Klein was talking about a couple who had been seeing him for sex therapy. They had an unhappy life together — mistrustful, resentful, insecure, unforgiving, uncommunicative, hostile — and their sex life was a predictable misery as a result. But they didn’t want to talk about their basic relationship problems. To quote Dr. Klein’s description of the sessions, “I didn’t seem that interested in talking about sex — I seemed overly focused on feelings, power dynamics, letting go of the past, and communication.” And they didn’t want to deal with any of that. They just wanted their sex life fixed. That’s what you go to a sex therapist for — right?

Okay. That’s a pretty obvious problem. As Dr. Klein said, “I have no idea what kind of sex they imagine they would have if they somehow desired each other — while disliking, mistrusting, and resenting each other. Whatever kind of sex that is, I don’t want to help people have it.” But what does it have to do with the “101 Positions To Spice Up Your Boring Sex Life” books?

Just this, yet again:

If you don’t already have a happy sex life, new sex positions by themselves are unlikely to make things better.

If you already have a good sex life — if you’re already mixing it up, if you’re already talking about what you like and what you might like to try next — there’s probably no harm in these books. You might even get a couple of good ideas from them. Then again, if you already have variety and experimentation and good communication in your sexual relationship, these books probably won’t be that much use. If you have all that, you can probably figure out most of these positions on your own.

But if what you have on your hands is an okay/ mediocre sex life that’s getting into a rut, I think these books can be actually harmful. They give a completely misleading idea of what it takes to introduce variety into a long-term sex life. They make it seem as if the heart of sexual variety lies, not in imagination and experimentation and honest loving communication, but in arranging your bodies at different intersecting angles. If couples try this, and it doesn’t make their sex lives feel invigorated — as it very likely wouldn’t — it seems to me that it’d be more discouraging than anything else.

And if what you have is a sexual relationship like that of Dr. Klein’s couple — a toxic waste dump loaded with mistrust, insecurity, and resentment, inside the bedroom and out — then trying the Sideways Triple Bypass isn’t going to help.

No matter how tastefully erotic the photos in the book are.

Greta Christina, copyright © 2009. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.

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