How and when and by whom they get touched gets worked out after we are born, in dynamic relation to our opportunities, socialization, and formative experiences.
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I’d argue that we are born with genitals that often feel good when touched. Are we born with a propensity to masturbate? Not exactly. We understand that masturbation is an activity, something people do or don’t do, but it’s not a personage. One doesn’t have to come out as a masturbator, go to masturbator bars and pride parades, or ask for acceptance because one was born a masturbator and simply can’t help themselves. Other sexual interests-like masturbation or oral sex-are not believed to constitute our identities. We also have to examine critically why we believe that the gender of our sex partners is something so significant that it is worthy of being not only an identity, but the outcome of a genetic or hormonal process. People actually have to do a lot of work (shaving, plucking, makeup, gendered hairstyles, gendered clothing, gendered affect) to maintain the appearance of a natural gender binary. In other words, the gay/straight/bi system is utterly dependent on a socially constructed gender binary (the idea that there are two types of people, women and men, and that they are inherently different), even though the gender binary itself is something of a fiction. Facial hair and muscles? Female bodies can have those too, but many women work hard to avoid these features, which have been deemed unattractive on women’s bodies. Penetration? That’s possible to enact with anyone. If you are a straight woman or a gay man, let’s say, what exactly does it mean to be attracted to men? You were born attracted to penises? Many straight women report that they find penises themselves unappealing. That may well be true, but if we are going to argue that we are born with the capacity to be attracted to women or men or both, we have to be willing to acknowledge that “women” and “men” are fuzzy categories themselves. Many people argue that we are born with particular sexual capacities or predispositions that are activated a few years later, in childhood, as we begin to notice and interact with other people’s bodies. Similarly, people are born with bodies that have the capacity to experience pleasure in response to all sorts of stimuli-masturbation, human contact, rubbing against objects-but it’s through socialization that we come to build an identity around whatever subset of our desires feels most salient. A child may have a vagina so you might think: "it’s a girl!," but you don’t actually know the child’s gender identity until that child has had the opportunity to express it themselves. So from a sociological standpoint, it doesn’t make whole lot of sense to call a two-month old a lesbian, for instance. Because identities are formed through social interaction (having sexual experiences, seeing sexual imagery, accepting or resisting labels given to us by other people, etc.), fetuses and newborn infants do not yet have identities.
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JW: For starters, “gay” and “straight” are identities that people use to describe their sexual desires. Below, Professor Ward expands on this topic, specifically addressing the argument of whether people are born straight or gay.ĪTTN: Why, according to your academic research, are people not simply born gay or straight?
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Recently, Professor Ward spoke with ATTN: about why many straight men engage in sexual activity with each other and their frequently homophobic rationalizations of why. Her new book, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, is available now through the NYU Press. Jane Ward is an associate professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California Riverside, where she teaches courses in feminist, queer, and heterosexuality studies.