You know, I think the main reason I wasn’t super interested in this book is that I expect it says a lot of things that I have already thought about and agree with. Reading your response makes me think I was correct about this. You can count me among the many women whose lifetime sexuality falls quite normally in between Louise Perry’s fussy “oh noooo, don’t have sex with someone you wouldn’t commit to, your poor heart, you’ll be so damagedddd” and Aella’s lurid “I would like a gangbang for my birthday.” The middle ground is wide and boring.
PMB is not wrong that being straight is a tad uncool with some of the young folks. My youngest sister and I had a conversation a few years ago where she mentioned being bi, and I said I was only mostly straight, and she said “yeah, women are just so pretty” and I said “nah, men are prettier, if you ask me,” and she looked at me like I had made a bit of a faux pas. I wasn’t following the script!
The thing is, both I and PMB are from a generation of internet feminists for whom overt desire for men really was seen as rebellious, as pushing back on a sexist society. Female heterosexuality is superficially normative, but when it is active rather than passive it violates an implicit rule that only women can be desired sexually and only men can do the desiring. We felt—I felt—like I was building my own straightness out of scattered parts: gay, straight, male, female, find the bits that resonate and make something authentic.
But of course it’s normal to grow old and uncool. I’m a monogamous straight-married woman in her early forties. I resigned myself long ago to being (outwardly) boring in my sexuality. It’s fine.
Louise Perry’s simpering remark to Ross Douthat about needing to learn to love the differences between the sexes by getting married did make me want to puke a little bit. If that kind of “my spouse is an avatar of Gender” was the only kind of straightness on offer then I, too, might be trying to borrow a little more queerness. But marriage, for me, feels more like an escape from all the genderslop nonsense. I am not married to Man. I am married to a person, who happens to be a man, which is nice, because I tend to like that sort of thing. And yes, I think he’s very pretty.
Thanks for your perspective! What makes these conversations so frustrating is the flip between talking about categories of people, which is unavoidable if one is talking about laws and commenting on “society” in general, and the feeling that all of us have that it is terribly reductive to talk about ourselves and our loved ones as merely a specimen of a category (even if not inaccurate from a more objective perspective), rather than a complex individual human being (or cat or dog being as the case may be).
I guess PMB is in a subtle way pushing back against some of the more radical political claims made on behalf of queer people, but Iike you I’m not really interested in a debunking of the claim that no woman is naturally sexually interested in a man unless he picks her up in a Lamborghini and pays for dinner etc.
Why PMB’s framing of the problem struck a nerve with me is that what we call “gay” culture is built on the idea of openly (some would say aggressively) expressing our desires, whether or not they are socially sanctioned. And I think the results have been a mixed bag.
You know, I think the main reason I wasn’t super interested in this book is that I expect it says a lot of things that I have already thought about and agree with. Reading your response makes me think I was correct about this. You can count me among the many women whose lifetime sexuality falls quite normally in between Louise Perry’s fussy “oh noooo, don’t have sex with someone you wouldn’t commit to, your poor heart, you’ll be so damagedddd” and Aella’s lurid “I would like a gangbang for my birthday.” The middle ground is wide and boring.
PMB is not wrong that being straight is a tad uncool with some of the young folks. My youngest sister and I had a conversation a few years ago where she mentioned being bi, and I said I was only mostly straight, and she said “yeah, women are just so pretty” and I said “nah, men are prettier, if you ask me,” and she looked at me like I had made a bit of a faux pas. I wasn’t following the script!
The thing is, both I and PMB are from a generation of internet feminists for whom overt desire for men really was seen as rebellious, as pushing back on a sexist society. Female heterosexuality is superficially normative, but when it is active rather than passive it violates an implicit rule that only women can be desired sexually and only men can do the desiring. We felt—I felt—like I was building my own straightness out of scattered parts: gay, straight, male, female, find the bits that resonate and make something authentic.
But of course it’s normal to grow old and uncool. I’m a monogamous straight-married woman in her early forties. I resigned myself long ago to being (outwardly) boring in my sexuality. It’s fine.
Louise Perry’s simpering remark to Ross Douthat about needing to learn to love the differences between the sexes by getting married did make me want to puke a little bit. If that kind of “my spouse is an avatar of Gender” was the only kind of straightness on offer then I, too, might be trying to borrow a little more queerness. But marriage, for me, feels more like an escape from all the genderslop nonsense. I am not married to Man. I am married to a person, who happens to be a man, which is nice, because I tend to like that sort of thing. And yes, I think he’s very pretty.
Thanks for your perspective! What makes these conversations so frustrating is the flip between talking about categories of people, which is unavoidable if one is talking about laws and commenting on “society” in general, and the feeling that all of us have that it is terribly reductive to talk about ourselves and our loved ones as merely a specimen of a category (even if not inaccurate from a more objective perspective), rather than a complex individual human being (or cat or dog being as the case may be).
I guess PMB is in a subtle way pushing back against some of the more radical political claims made on behalf of queer people, but Iike you I’m not really interested in a debunking of the claim that no woman is naturally sexually interested in a man unless he picks her up in a Lamborghini and pays for dinner etc.
Why PMB’s framing of the problem struck a nerve with me is that what we call “gay” culture is built on the idea of openly (some would say aggressively) expressing our desires, whether or not they are socially sanctioned. And I think the results have been a mixed bag.