Is sexual orientation a choice?

My suspicion is that if there were no barriers to sexual choice, people would be pretty indiscriminate. We have the capacity to be turned on by just about anything.

Beachcomber: That was part of what the article which is the subject of the op was saying. I agree with you, and think doing anything for just politicle or any other idealogical reason is long term unsustainable.

i think if politics changed sexuality ratios would change too.

most people naturally tend to drift the easiest way. if lesbian culture was as present as heterosexual and there were no deterrants or sacrifices in being homosexual i think we'd see a much more even spread.

Beachcomber, I went to a couple of girls schools, lesbianism was very much part of my consciousness growing up. Plus, I would expect most people's earliest, prepubescent sexual experimentation occurs with their own sex because girls and boys give one another a wide birth until puberty. I expect that homosexual sex feels a safer option for many.

But whatever its origins, when we look hard and clearly at the extent and elaboration of measures designed to keep women within a male sexual purlieu, it becomes an inescapable question whether the issue we have to address as feminists is not simple "gender inequality," nor the domination of culture by males, nor mere "taboos against homosexuality," but the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring male right of physical, economical, and emotional access.43 One of many means of enforcement is, of course the rendering invisible of the lesbian possibility, an engulfed continent that rises frequently to view from time to time only to become submerged again. Feminist research and theory that contributes to lesbian invisibility or marginality is actually working against the liberation and empowerment of women as a group.

The assumption that "most women are innately heterosexual'' stands as a theoretical and political stumbling block for many women. It remains a tenable assumption, partly because lesbian existence has been written out of history or catalogued under disease; partly because it has been treated as exceptional rather than intrinsic; partly because to acknowledge that for women heterosexuality may not be a "preference" at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized and maintained by force is an immense step to take if you consider yourself freely and "innately" heterosexual. Yet the failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness. To take the step of questioning heterosexuality as a ''preference'' or "choice" for womenand to do the intellectual and emotional work that followswill call for a special quality of courage in heterosexually identified feminists but I think the rewards will be great: a freeing-up of thinking, the exploring of new paths, the shattering of another great silence, new clarity in personal relationships.

The Adrienne Rich essay linked to by Ethel says it all really. I do hope people are reading it.

Making a choice about what gender you sleep with for politicle reasons is fine and well, but let us be clear it is a politicle act, politicly motivated and driven.

I don't think it is that simple.

I can see the discussion has moved on since last night. I am sorry if the 'd' word offended HhP or anyone else. I was not aware that it was offensive as I thought it was a term used by lesbians themselves, a bit like gay men being queer or queens. I guess it's all down to context.

Anyway, I am still confused by a section of the original article, on the subject of a US survey of 400 lesbian and bisexual women;

'It was also found that "[s]ome bisexual women actually doubt whether bisexual women exist at all." '

Does that mean that said women doubted their own existence?

Out of interest how many people here had any kind of lesbian culture in their childhood?

Books, films, TV shows, fairy tales, poetry, family, friends, etc.

I had none (apart from my great aunts but I only found out about their sexuality as a late teen). The first time I heard anything about lesbianism was the use of the word 'lezzer' used as an insult at school for girls who were a bit different or that the boys didn't like.

I did come across a little bit of lesbian culture as a teenager but only because I went looking (poetry, books).

Swallowed: I think your story tells it exactly as it is, people are complex bags of emotions and hormones. Often people need everything to click in place to be happy whilst others can trundle along with 90% of things being in place. Making a choice about what gender you sleep with for politicle reasons is fine and well, but let us be clear it is a politicle act, politicly motivated and driven.
This raises other issues such as what if the larger politicle landscape underwent some kind of revolution, say a breakdown in society becouse of war, or didatser. Would the politics of the individual change?

Choice doesn't have to be rational or even conscious. Our preferences, what disgusts us or attracts us is a highly complex and subtle area of psychological development that most of us are not consciously aware of. You aren't born with your tastes, preferences, fears, phobias or addictions intact in other areas, so why would you be in the sexual arena? A great deal of our sexual preferences are determined by our imprinting on our parents for example.

Does the heterosexual choose to be attracted to the arty type, or the business tycoon, or we're they born feeling that way? Is the paedophile, necrophiliac, incestuous person, promiscuous person, sado-masochist born that way or do they become that way?

tbf my experience won't only be about sexuality but about the fact that i just haven't really been orientated towards a life partner type set up. there have been bigger drives - i wanted to travel, i wanted to study, i wanted to do x, y and z, i was on personal growth trips etc. the find someone and settle down drive kind of passed me by.

You might be forced to have sex with someone from a gender you do not normally choose, but if the choice is free of and all things being equal most people will stay within their own preference. I do not see how choice comes in to it. I think instinct, hormones, and mental capacity to be open to having sex with each gender is more at play than a sit down with a piece of paper list pro's and con's rational choice.

How do you know you can't choose to feel an orientation? There is no science to back that stance up. I suspect that we do all choose our orientations and have he capacity to feel differently. Most of us are taught to feel only a heterosexual orientation and close off homosexual feelings, but when inhibitions come down with drink or drugs we see that this choice is often quite a superficial one.

i think i'm one of the people who could choose. it could have gone either way in my early 20's and i chose the path of least resistance which was the non choice in a sense because it was societally deemed 'normal' and did not require me to do anything in particular except go with the flow.

now in my mid thirties, a happily single mother raising a child without paternal involvement i do sometimes wonder if maybe my lack of staying power in relationships was because i actually didn't have enough real erotic love for men and intimacy with women seemed to have more psychic/spiritual/whatever value for me. i'd just about come round to thinking i was a lesbian when i suddenly started noticing men again

i think julie bindel is talking to people like me who could and in her mind should choose women to make a statement. i understand the sentiment politically and i've had this lecture from lesbians when i was young who could not fathom why i chose to continue to sleep with men when i was bright and could 'see' and clearly could fancy women. the thing is though my life and love moves more organically than that. sure if i met a woman and fell in love with her that'd be fine, great and i'd face all the hard stuff that was necessary for us to be together but i haven't met that woman so it remains a theoretical construct and the world i live in does not contain gay women, it doesn't contain many men either. if i meet someone that i fall in love with and want to be with i'm going to go for that because for me it's really rare. it's rare i fancy someone and feel a deep connection with them and want it enough to inconvenience my happy life as it is. i can't afford to say if i fall in love with the 'wrong' sex i'll ignore it.

but i do concede that that is me not putting my politics first, i'm ringfencing an area and saying that's just about me and what i want. and this may all be hypothetical because my chances of meeting a man who is capable of a really equal relationship without patriarchal overtones is pretty slim i guess.

right i've waffled and i've been personal. bored of rucks on here.

It depends. You can't choose not to feel an orientation (altho you can deny it), but you can choose to adopt one for political or other reasons.

Of course what people are forgetting is that heterosexuality may be a choice too.

If we look at the animal kingdom there is some evidence to suggest that the natural state is to be fairly sexually indiscriminate, old, young, same or opposite sex, inanimate objects, other species, even dead animals come in for sexual attention. Just as in the human species. But in human society we are at pains to separate sexual behaviour into silos and label some normal and some abnormal, we want to be able to say "that person is always this thing and it is good/bad". Whereas I suspect the reality is more complex and we all have the potential to go in any number of directions in general and minute by minute, but exaggerate certain sexual preferences due to life experiences and subconscious or conscious beliefs or desires.

For those who say there are no benefits to being lesbian and nobody would consciously choose that path if there were alternatives, I think you are a) overlooking the fact that choice doesn't have to be conscious and b) there are certain benefits to some individuals in some circumstances.

Why should it be a threat to your lifestyle that you take part in it willingly rather than unwillingly? Surelynthepolitical argument isn't whether you have a choice, but whether you have the right to that choice?

Thanks for those links Ethel

Brilliant essay by Adrienne Rich. Thanks Ethel.

My organizing impulse is the belief that it is not enough for feminist thought that specifically lesbian texts exist. Any theory or cultural/political creation that treats lesbian existence as a marginal or less "natural" phenomenon, as mere "sexual preference," or as the mirror image of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations is profoundly weakened thereby, whatever its other contributions. Feminist theory can no longer afford merely to voice a toleration of "lesbianism" as an "alternative life-style," or make token allusion to lesbians. A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is long overdue. In this exploratory paper, I shall try to show why.

I am suggesting that heterosexuality, like mother-hood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution

why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men.

The list of characteristics of male power is sobering and thought provoking.

My grandmother had three sisters who chose to be 'spinsters'.

They lived together and all had jobs and travelled a lot. Two of them had very close female friends, who my mum later told me, were lovers. The third sister was celibate AFAIK.

I know from talking to my aunts that this was very much a lifestyle they chose. They were from a family of 11 children and didn't want a heteronormative set up - they didn't call it that . They called it 'being married'.

What Ethel said - well done for saying it.