Sometimes I am frustrated by my appearance of conventionality after years of carefully cultivating a liberal perspective. I believe that gender and sexuality are a spectrum, that individuals should be able to explore their own identities free from the judgement and censure of society. I believe that female sexuality has been abused over the ages and that it’s about time that we realised women have sex drives just as much as men and that men are not animals who can’t control themselves at the sight of a bit of naked flesh. Most of all I believe that loving someone else really is the best thing about being a human being and that to begrudge two people the happiness they find in each other is wrong.
However, I sometimes think I have never been able to take full advantage of my beliefs. Unfortunately I’m much too introverted to be a fan of casual sex and the truth is I much prefer to read a good book on a Friday night. Despite encountering a disproportionate number of lesbians during my student days I always seemed to fancy men. Then at the traditional age of twenty-one I fell madly in love with a lovely man and got engaged and subsequently married in an (almost) traditional way. Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a footnote explaining; ‘just because I got married doesn’t mean I think you have to. Just because I wore a white dress doesn’t mean I support the idea that a woman’s virginity has anything to do with her value as a human being. PS. It’s incidental that my husband’s a man. I’d be just as happy if he’d ended up being a woman.
However recently I have comforted myself with the thought that I might be more of a double agent with a great opportunity to explain to society why re-exploring our preconceptions about gender and sex is good for everyone, including boring old married and relatively straight folk like myself.
So how have I benefitted and why is this movement good for everyone?
I believe it is an opportunity for humanity to evolve our perspective of love into something more beautiful and liberating. My husband often likes to establish the limits of my love. He likes to inquire if I would still love him if he was a rhinoceros/alien/inanimate object. Of course I reassure him that I would love him whatever he was (unless that something was a conservative politician). I romantically like to think that love is the connection between the underlying spirits of two people, a union between the essence of who they are. I think I would love feebly if I could not say that I would love my husband regardless of his genitalia. I have met hundreds of men and women who I haven’t wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I fell in love with him because of who he is and I want to be able to say I would love him and marry him regardless of his sex or gender identity. This paradigm shift is more obvious for same sex couples or transgender people but it is relevant for everyone. On the back of the understanding that I love my husband because of who is he is rather than because he is a man comes a loosening of traditional gender roles that sets us both free to be primarily individual people in a relationship rather than being dominated by the prescriptive gender based identities assigned to us by virtue of our biology alone.
This paradigm shift also has the potential to revolutionise our ideas about sex which are rooted in a heterosexual male-centric view focussed around penis in vagina penetration. I remember someone once telling me that one of the issues with allowing lesbians to marry was that legally the definition of adultery is based on penetrative sex. Now I’m fairly confident it is possible for a lesbian couple to betray one another so perhaps our definitions are flawed and need to be revisited. If we accept that two women can have sex then we have automatically drastically broadened that definition of what sex is. I kind of love the idea of a lesbian who has slept with loads of women being able to say she is a virgin because it highlights how ridiculous the concept is. The idea that one minute you’re a virgin and the next minute you’re not is just entirely divorced from reality. Sexual experience is a much more complicated medley of encounters and recognition of this can free young women from the ridiculous burden of trying to decide what to do with the “virginity” that has been hoisted on them. I could never decide whether it was an embarrassing inconvenience to be got rid of as quickly as possible or something to be given as a gift to the chosen one. Then experience taught me that intimacy is much more complicated than a simple physical act.
Dispelling the virginity myth also tackles ideas about sexual purity which can make girls feel dirty and guilty when they do have sex outside of whatever restrictions their society has placed upon it. A friend once said to me that she couldn’t understand how our mutual friend could have sex before marriage because it would make her feel like ‘used goods’. It is time to make it clear that society has no business judging the interactions between two consenting adults and that no human being is ever ‘used goods.’ Additionally if we are celebrating how wonderfully unique our partners are rather than trying to make them what they “should” be, it becomes clear that holding a person’s sexual experience, or lack of, against them is a very weak form of love indeed.
Finally, gay sex begins as an interaction between equals, free from the burden of thousands of years of patriarchy. A nun at school once told me that God was male because the man is the active party in sexual intercourse. God is the ‘active’ party in his relationship with human beings and is therefore male in character. But in a lesbian relationship there is no man, so clearly women can manage to get their act together and participate. Similarly, with male gay relationships when there is no woman to be traditionally tender and loving, the men have to step up. It is good for everyone’s sex lives for ideas about feminine passivity and masculine voracity to be dispelled.
So while I may not have chosen to marry a woman or gone further than a gender neutral haircut, I am massively enjoying the benefits of the current global movement towards a more liberal understanding of sex and gender. It has already taught me to love more deeply and freely and I reckon it has done a lot of good for my sex life. It is a symbol of progress and change and those who do not want to stagnate in outdated gender roles that hold both men and women back should embrace it.
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