This semester in my History of Sexuality class I did a paper pertaining to a recent study on adults in America's attitudes toward bisexuality, and the results suggested that more people were accepting of women being bisexual as opposed to men. This wasn't always the norm and I did an essay analyzing this notion. I thought it might be of interest to others:
Initially when I read the recent scientific study pertaining to how adults in the United States feel toward people who identify as bisexual (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27783644), I was not surprised to learn that a significant amount of people felt more positive about women being bisexual than men; this is because I have noticed that a lot of heterosexual men think that lesbian sexual relations are for their own sexual entertainment, as well as observing that a man is thought of as less masculine if he does not identify as heterosexual. But when I put this study into the context of this course, the findings did surprise me and they did not make as much sense as they did at first. I could see why people could be uncomfortable with the idea of bisexuality because it breaks our binary thinking toward sexuality that emerged in the twentieth century according to David Halperin, but I found myself wondering when male sexual activity that was not heterosexual became more condemned than female non-heterosexual activity.[1]
The main thing that leads me to be surprised by this study’s findings is the long history of female sexuality being demonized. We talked about the power of the Catholic Church in Europe during the Medieval Period and how it was thought that a woman’s pleasure was not in God’s morality, as well as how the writers of that time wrote about the evils of female lust.[2] These societies saw female sexuality as dangerous, as seen with the witch-hunts in Germany “the European witch-hunt has long been related to issues of gender and sexual politics… Witch-hunters began to focus increasingly on the supposed sexual activity of witches.”[3] These lectures and readings brought the repression of female sexuality to light and the study that I chose to focus on shows that these sexual restraints have changed, or even almost flipped. During the Medieval Period it was thought that “the root of disorder was female lust” and you see people more concerned with female sexuality than with male sexuality.[4] This extended well beyond the Medieval Period, and the contempt for female sexuality may have even gotten more pronounced; Jack The Ripper, a supposed male serial killer in London during the 1880s killed prostitutes in gruesome ways, likely because he thought they were sinful.[5] This goes to show just how bothered some people were over female sexuality and the need to control and suppress it. The Church even made rules about what kinds of positions women could be in while having sex, ensuring that men were the active ones in sex and women were passive. This recent study shows that people are generally more open to women having relations with men and other women and opposed to men doing the same. I thought that female sexuality is still more demonized than male in our modern day society, but after reading this study and putting it into a historical context, maybe it is not. And it might not be for the wrong reasons, because I still think that masculinity and men feeling entitled to all relationships concerning women definitely influence how people feel about sexuality, but it is now more acceptable for women to engage with relationships with other women or even just be open with their sexuality than it has been for a while. I see the changes in attitude that have taken place over time toward female sexuality.
Another thing that came to mind while reading this study was how same-sex relations between men were not looked down upon until recently. In Ancient Greece, pederasty, or a sexual mentoring relationship between a citizen and young boy, was thought highly of; sexual relations between two like-bodied people were not demonized in Ancient Greece society as long as those two people were not of similar social status.[6] Same-sex relations between females likely took place, but they were not in the discourse, however we do see an encouragement of sexual relations between men. This is in deep contrast from what we see today, as the study points out the group of people that were the most negative toward men being bisexual were heterosexual men. One could argue that Ancient Greece is too dated to relate to modern day, but in the movie Kinsey we see that the 1950s was not in complete contrast to ancient societies. Kinsey argued that no two people are alike and one’s sexual preferences vary, similar to David Halperin classifying the Ancient Greeks as having sexual appetites rather than identities.[7] His findings lead to a male sexual revolution where homosexual relations, masturbation, and sex were not as repressed as they were before. We saw that he was praised for his studies on male sexuality, but when he released something on female sexuality, he received a massive amount of backlash and even lost funding for his research.[8] The sexual suppression of female sexuality was even apparent in the 1950s, while male sexuality was more liberated, contrasting the findings of the study on bisexuality. I did notice the start of the shift, however, when we started talking about the gay liberation movements. Sodomy laws were more concerned with male homosexual activity and made it a felony in every single state up until 1962; women who engaged sexually with other women were sometimes convicted, but not under sodomy laws.[9] We see this emphasis on suppressing male non-heterosexual activity shortly after Kinsey, which then points to the findings of people being more comfortable with women being bisexual as opposed to men.
The historical demonization of female sexuality and the encouragement of non-heterosexual relations between males made the findings of the study problematic, simply because it differs greatly from what was going in history for long periods of time. We see this shift in attitudes toward male and female sexuality in the 1960s, where people were more concerned with condemning men who engaged in sexual relations with other men. This shift that happened less than 60 years ago validates the findings in the recent study on attitudes in the United States toward bisexuality and the differences in feelings toward female and male bisexuality, but I am still wondering what caused this shift to occur. I was definitely able to better understand the study through the material that I have studied throughout this course, and I think that it would be really interesting to learn what caused people to fear male sexuality more in the 1960s given the long history of female sexuality being demonized.
[1] Halperin, David M. "Sex Before Sexuality: Pederasty, Politics, and Power in Ancient Athens." Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. Ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey. N.p.: n.p., 1990. Print. 44.
[2] Lecture on the Medieval Period, Aminda Smith.
[3] Zika, Charles. "Exorcising Our Demons." Studies in Midieval and Reformation Thought. Ed. Andrew C. Gow. Boston: Leiden Brill, 2003. Print. 238.
[4] Abid, 239.
[5] Lecture video on Jack the Ripper, Aminda Smith.
[6] Lecture on Ancient Greece Sexuality, Aminda Smith.
[7] Mutrux, Gail, Producer. Kinsey . Directed by Bill Condon, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2004. Accessed 1 Nov. 2016.
[8] Abid.
[9] Lecture on the Beginnings of the Gay Liberation Movement, Aminda Smith.
