Читать книгу Still Straight - Tony Silva - Страница 10

While most people consider heterosexuality to be only an identity or a sexual preference, in fact it is much more. Today, heterosexuality is both an identity and a set of social and sexual practices and experiences.85 Heterosexuality is gendered, such that most people expect straight men to be masculine and straight women to be feminine. This attitude comes with assumptions about how men and women should interact with other people, both sexually and nonsexually. Gender norms built into heterosexuality help to create and reinforce social inequalities between men and women.86 Heterosexuality today is also an institution and an organizing principle of social life.87 Sexual identification as straight or otherwise is not a “natural” reflection of sexuality, because cultural norms affect the meanings and social practices that people attach to it. Most people take heterosexuality for granted and treat it as though it is disconnected from culture and society, when that is not true. While there are biological influences affecting sexual attractions,88 sexual identification differs across cultural and historical contexts.

Because of this, sexual identification can differ within countries.89 Within the United States, some people define themselves on the basis of their sexual attractions, whereas others identify in ways that reflect their current sexual or romantic partners.90 Similarly, some people identify themselves on the basis of their romantic attractions but not their sexual attractions or behaviors.91 Still others identify as straight because they believe stereotypes about LGBQ people, and do not think they fit those stereotypes.92

Additionally, legal rights or the lack thereof can shape identification. For instance, women who lived in states that recognized same-sex relationships before the US Supreme Court legalized that recognition nationwide were more likely to change their identity from straight to lesbian or bisexual than women who lived in more conservative states.93 Coming from more educated and liberal family backgrounds may also make it more likely for people to identify as LGBQ.94 Gendered social forces also affect sexual identification: men are much more likely than women to identify as exclusively straight.95 One reason for this is that women are seen as less socially valuable than men, so they have more leeway to challenge gender and sexual norms.96 For instance, most Americans do not see affection between women, like hugging or sharing a bed, as sexual, but they typically do with men. Hence, this behavior is perceived as gay for men but not usually for women.

Social patterns related to race also affect sexual identification. While men of all races and immigrant statuses are about equally likely to identify as straight, there are wide variations among women: Native American women have the lowest likelihood, and immigrant Asian women have the highest.97 In short, a variety of social forces affect whether or not a person identifies as straight.

My study, which involved interviewing American men between the ages of nineteen and seventy-five who grew up in or currently lived in a rural area or small town, is part of a small base of qualitative interview research seeking to understand why some individuals with same-sex practices identify as LGBQ whereas others identify as straight. Other researchers have found that many working-class women identify as straight, despite enjoying sex with women, because they view their status as mothers or partners to men as incompatible with LGBQ identification.98 Some middle-class women who have sex with women similarly feel that the identification of straight describes them best, in part because they do not want to end their partnerships with men.99

Interviews with straight men who have sex with men show that many of them bolster their straight identities by framing sex with men as emotionless and by emphasizing exclusive or primary attractions to women.100 Some also feel that the word “gay” means feminine and that “bisexual” is too stigmatized or ambiguous to describe them.101 Qualitative research such as this shows that many factors other than attractions and sexual practices influence straight identification, including the meanings individuals attribute to childrearing, different-sex partnerships, and gay or bisexual identities.

Moreover, while it is impossible to determine whether one can generalize from the results of qualitative studies, nationally representative surveys show that there are distinct types of straight-identified individuals with same-sex sexuality.102 In one of my other studies, I found that about half of straight-identified men who have had two or more male sexual partners or who report substantial attraction to men are not overtly homophobic.103 What links these men goes beyond overt homophobia: embeddedness in straight culture, enjoyment of being part of a socially dominant group that does not experience discrimination, and feeling that their straightness is a key part of their masculinity all likely play a role. Qualitative studies like the one in this book can explore these themes and mechanisms of identification in greater depth.