Bisexual monogamy: Twice the temptation but half the fun?

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 347-368

  Vernallis, Kayley ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 1542558384     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0047-2786.00022     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. See Amber Ault, "Hegemonic Discourse in an Oppositional Community: Lesbian Feminists and Bisexuality", Critical Sociology 20, no. 20(1994):107. The quote comes from one of Ault's interviewees. More than 30 percent of her lesbian subjects expressed negative attitudes toward bisexuals.
2. Alfred Kinsey was one of the first to document the extraordinary range of sexual behaviors. For instance, he observed that 37 percent of men and 13 percent of women had adult same-sex contact that included orgasm. See Alfred Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948)
3. and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953). Kinsey regarded sexuality as a continuum, and developed a bipolar scale with exclusive homosexuality at one end and exclusive heterosexuality at the other. For a critique of the Kinsey scale, as well as alternatives such as the Storm axis and the Klein grid, in light of bisexual issues
4. see Amanda Udis-Kessler, "Appendix: Notes on the Kinsey Scale and Other Measures of Sexuality", in Elizabeth Weise, ed., Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism (Seattle: Seal Press, 1992), 311-18.
5. In this essay I overlook important gender, race, and class differences among bisexuals. Thus I treat bisexuality as a much more coherent category than it is, hoping that my discussion will address concerns that bisexuals of many persuasions face. For discussions of some of the class and race issues that affect bisexuals, see Elizabeth McKeon, "To Be Bisexual and Underclass", and Brenda Marie Blasingame, "The Roots of Biphobia: Racism and Internalized Heterosexism", in Weise, ed., Closer to Home.
6. See also Ana Maria Alonso and Maria Teresa Koreck, "Silences: 'Hispanics', AIDS, and Sexual Practices", and Tomas Almaguer, "Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior", in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993). For a discussion of gender differences
7. see M. R. Laner, "Permanent Partner Priorities: Gay and Straight", Journal of Homosexuality 9(1977):87-97.
8. For a review of the psychological literature, see Gregory D. Morrow, "Bisexuality: An Exploratory Review", in Annals of Sex Research 2(1989):283-306. Most of these factors are also conceptually compatible with monogamy, although some are deficient for other reasons. For instance, treating self-identification as the sole criterion of sexual orientation takes too seriously an individual's avowal of a particular sexual orientation, when it is a claim intended to hide his or her behavior and dispositions. More importantly, the simple self-identification view desexualizes sexual orientation.
9. Interestingly, the argument has not had much appeal for at least one group of bisexuals. One fascinating in-depth study of bisexuals in the San Francisco area found that 80 percent of the bisexuals interviewed in 1983 preferred nonmonogamous relationships. Among that group, the most commonly preferred ideal arrangement included a deep love/sexual relationship with both a man and a woman, which would at the same time allow less-committed sexual relationships with others. About a third of those interviewed said they had experienced their ideal arrangement, but in the majority of cases the duration of their ideal relationship was shorter than six months. The short duration suggests it is rare for such arrangements to foster genuine intimacy and love. A follow-up study five years later found increasing numbers of bisexuals identifying their ideal relationships as monogamous. AIDS was often mentioned, but so was the idea that age and maturity enabled one to recognize that intimacy could be achieved more readily through sexual exclusivity. Often AIDS led to a reexamination of an individual's experience of sexuality. One person commented, "AIDS made me look at the real emptiness I experienced having anonymous sex." Martin S. Weinberg, Colin J. Williams, and Douglas W. Pryor, Dual Attraction: Understanding Bisexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 76-79, 258-63.
10. Sigmund Freud, "'Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" (1908), in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 9 (London: Hogarth, 1959), 181-204. If we eliminate abstinence prior to a monogamous commitment, monogamy may not require such a great sacrifice of sexual satisfaction, particularly if we include the "inversions" as candidates for monogamous commitment. How far such ameliorating factors will go depends of course upon Freud's underlying theory of sexual drives and their relation to both adult sexual satisfaction and overall psychological adjustment. For instance, Freud notes that the Rat Man's various debilitating obsessional behaviors are traced to his father's prohibitions regarding Franz's sexuality, yet at the same time Franz's adult sexual satisfaction is fairly intact (and other cases of obsessive neurosis are even more free of pathogenic elements). Although he generally broadens scope of the sexual, Freud nevertheless thinks it is possible to go at least some distance in separating sexual function from other aspects of flourishing in a life.
11. See "Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis" (1909) (more widely known as the Rat Man case) in The Standard Edition, vol. 10, 165.
12. Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Regulating Character Structure, trans. Therese Pol (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1945), 146. Reich himself seems to believe that many repressive features of monogamy will disappear once women gain financial independence. Even under better circumstances he advocates neither monogamy nor endless promiscuity, but rather an enduring sexual relationship with one person punctuated by casual sexual encounters with others (131).
13. See "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism" and "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation" in Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1917), 177 and 229, respectively.
14. Rebecca Shuster, "Beyond Defense: Considering Next Steps for Bisexual Liberation", in Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu, eds., Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991), 269.
15. Robin Morgan, The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1982), 301.
16. Consider Lenore Norrgard's response to the question of whether bisexuals can be monogamous: "I think the easy 'Sure!' answer is offered up in a plea, unconscious though it may be, to nonbis to accept us as 'just folks', to make them believe we are just like them. To ward off the uncomfortable realization that the choices we make in how we live our sexuality are different from those that exclusively lesbian or exclusively straight people make." Lenore Norrgard, "Can Bisexuals Be Monogamous?" in Hutchins and Kaahumanu, Bi Any Other Name, 283.
17. Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 1. 191d.
18. Certainly no biologist, not even Dean Hammer, who is searching for a gay gene, thinks our sexual orientations are fixed in this sense. Hammer, remember, is the scientist who believes that a region of the X chromosome (Xq28) is correlated with sexual orientation. Even still, there is no one to one expression between genotype and phenotype: "Genes influence behavior through indirect and complex paths that require inputs from physiology, the environment, society, and culture." Dean Hammer and Peter Copeland, The Science of Desire (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994), 204. Even when pressed to estimate the role genetics play in behavior, Hammer guesses no more than 5-35 percent. Even if sexual orientation is more strongly influenced by genotype, we would need to know why it is important to abide by one's nature in the case of sexual orientation but not in the case of a whole host of other cases ranging from eye color, cystic fibrosis, sensitivity of taste buds or saltiness, etc.
19. Charles Taylor uses the term "expressivism" to name a view found in the romantic movement of the late 18th-early 19th centuries. On this view, our task in life is to focus inward on our desires and sentiments, and then to allow them to come to expression in action. If we act from such an inner source which is also nature, we will achieve a synthesis of reason and spirituality. Of course, the paradigm case of such unity is to be found in the nature of the artist. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 368-392. Also see his broadly expressivist treatment of agency in "What Is Human Agency?" in
20. Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). In that essay, Taylor identifies agency with the capacity for "strong evaluations", namely, the capacity to engage in second-order reflections which rely on judgments of worth. I am generally sympathetic to his account, but here I intend the notion of expressivism to be compatible with a wide range of accounts of what makes a desire central to a person's identity, including such things as second-order volitions, narrative unity, and so on.
21. Freud, "'Civilized' Sexual Morality", 198 (emphasis in original).
22. Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1989).
23. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 43.
24. Amelie Oskenberg Rorty and David Wong, "Aspects of Identity and Agency", in Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oskenberg Rorty, eds., Identity, Character, and Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 19-36.
25. See M. D. Storms, "Theories of Sexual Orientation", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38, no. 5(1980):783-92.
26. Also see Kinsey's early work. For a longitudinal study see Weinberg et al., Dual Attraction.
27. Actually, because of various cultural associations between eye color and race, this example is not uncontroversial. It is an interesting question whether there are any features of bodies that are not racially or ethnically marked in some way. For a discussion of how sexual desire may be constructed in fundamental ways by racial stereotypes, see Laurie Shrage, "Is Sexual Desire Raced? The Social Meaning of Interracial Prostitution", Journal of Social Philosophy 33, no. 1(Spring 1992):42-51.
28. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1990). For an earlier treatment see chapter 9 of
29. Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1974). Both point out, for instance, how arbitrary and uncorrelated the various criteria are not just for gender requirements, but for biological sex assignments, including hormone levels, chromosomal makeup, primary and secondary sex characteristics, and so on.
30. See Paula Rust, "Who Are We and Where Do We Go From Here? Conceptualizing Bisexuality" in Weise, Closer to Home, 281-310.
31. See Michael Ross and Jay Paul, "Beyond Gender: The Basis of Sexual Attraction in Bisexual Men and Women" (Psychological Reports 71(1992):1283-90). The term "non-gender-specific" comes from Ross and Paul. Also remember that one fifth of Weinberg's bisexual subjects failed to identify relevant differences in sexual activity with men and women.
32. Jan Clausen, "My Interesting Condition", Journal of Sex Research 27, no. 3(1990):454.