Straight (14 page)

People of differing sexual orientations, on the other hand, do not seem to have physical attributes that differ in ways that map to their sexual orientations, and thus do not seem to be differently affected by natural laws on that basis either. Sexual orientations seem to be a lot more like what philosopher of science Edward Stein calls “social human kinds.”[
21
] Social human kinds are groupings of human beings based on common social factors: Democrats, vegetarians, Frenchmen, athletes, Catholics. What this suggests is that the social sciences may have more meaningful things to tell us about the organizing principle we call sexual orientation than the physical and biomedical sciences can. Sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics should all be very useful in helping us understand more about heterosexuality and how it works. Leaving the study of heterosexuality, and of sexual orientation generally, to the social sciences may be difficult for a culture whose doxa still holds that only the natural sciences possess truly impartial authority. It may, however, not only prove to be the most intellectually honest path, but the most scientifically rigorous as well.

Single women, decreed the anonymous author of the vicious and popular 1713
Satyr Upon Old Maids,
were “the Devil's Dish,” “nasty, rank, rammy, filthy Sluts.” So grotesque were these spinsters,
Satyr
continued, that they ought to hurl themselves into matrimony with whoever they could find to take them, even idiots, lechers, or lepers, so that they could avoid being “piss'd on with Contempt” for their unseemly, unwomanly, inappropriate singleness.[
1
]

By 1962, well before the so-called “sexual revolution” or even the feminist slogan “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” Helen Gurley Brown could write in
Sex and the Single Girl,
“I think marriage is insurance for the
worst
years of your life. During your best years you don't need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way, but they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozen.”

Clearly, something major changed between 1713 and 1962. But it wasn't just a shift in attitudes about single women. The transformation of the unmarried woman, from repellent, ridiculous freak to savvy, sophisticated bachelorette, could be more accurately viewed as an indicator of far larger and deeper changes in how people of all sexes thought about and experienced heterosexuality. One way to understand what was going on is to look at marriage, the defining issue for both
Satyr
and
Sex and the Single Girl,
which, as social conservatives
never tire of reminding us, has historically been the canonical, form-conferring relationship type of heterosexuality.

How, indeed, did we get from
Satyr
to Helen Gurley Brown, or for that matter, to even less economically and socially heteronormative non-marrying role models like Oprah Winfrey? Once, marriage was so central to expectations of the life trajectory that those who failed to marry (and it seems consistently that around 10 percent did not, typically for reasons beyond their control) could be openly mocked, harassed, and perhaps even arrested and imprisoned.[
2
] Now, not only do both men and women regard marriage as part of a strategy of personal fulfillment, just as Helen Gurley Brown counseled all those years ago, but they can consider it separately from other sources of personal fulfillment like sexual activity, making a living, or having children. The forms we expect intimate personal relationships between men and women to take, the roles we expect them to fulfill, and what we've expected them to do for us have changed dramatically. This has occurred thanks to three major arenas of cultural change, all essentially issues of individual (and especially female) autonomy in terms of subjective desire, civic identity, and reproduction.

TO MARRY ACCORDING TO YOUR DESIRE

Desire, as any teenager can tell you, is a wild and variegated ride. Our desires can be reasoned or impulsive, fleeting or steadfast, and for things or people, sensations or possessions, experiences or emotions. Desire is also, as Buddhism reminds us in one way and consumerism in another, a constant of the human condition.

Contemporary Western culture is a culture steeped in and driven by individual desires. It has come to seem utterly logical that marriage, foremost of all our human relationships, be based in desire, specifically in emotional and sexual desire. But this has not always been the case. For most of human history, desire and marriage have not had much to do with one another. Marriage was an obligation. Wanting to marry, and even wanting to marry a particular person, had little or nothing to do with it.

Erotic desire in particular was not seen as truly relevant to marriage until the twentieth century. Historically, it simply does not seem to have been viewed as a particularly big concern, especially for
women. It was taken for granted that men and women would be capable of fulfilling their reproductive duties in marriage. Beyond that, there seems to have been much more concern about making sure that sexual behavior was not excessive or sinful than there was any worry about whether it was of a sufficiently high quality. We don't have any way of knowing how most married men and women felt about one another sexually. It seems reasonable to assume that the range of sentiments ran the complete human gamut, from enthusiastic love and passion to boredom and alienation, and inevitably in some cases to fear and trauma. But very few people left any sort of record of their sexual lives at all. In most cases all we know is that most married couples managed to get it on, and we only know this because they had children. They were only doing what they had to: not for nothing was spousal sex, particularly insofar as it called for the wife to submit to the husband's sexual needs, called “paying the marriage debt.”

If we are to talk about marriage in the West prior to the past few centuries, we can assume that sexual activity was included, but lust, desire, pleasure, and a sense of the erotic were not necessarily part of the picture. Nor did marriage imply romantic love. Prior to the modern era, marriage was a social, an economic, and frequently also a religious obligation, but whether or not it would or should be anything else in addition was not an issue on which everyone could agree. Should a spouse be capable of fulfilling one's wants for friendship, warmth, sympathy, and affection, or were these things unnecessary to the serious business of marriage? Did it matter whether a betrothed person actually liked his or her spouse-to-be, found him or her to be charming or sympathetic or amusing? Should you actually
desire
the person to whom you were betrothed? These were serious and divisive questions.

For much of human history, the process of acquiring a spouse was much more like what we'd experience today in making a new hire. It was a choice made by committee, for one thing. The potential new spouse usually got a vote, but she or he did not always have a veto. Candidates were usually selected by parents, near relatives, and various neighbors and friends, not so much on the basis of personal qualities or looks—it was assumed that any reasonable person could fill the bill, just as we assume with regard to new coworkers—but on the solidity
of their qualifications. For the elites this meant lineage and title, expectations of inheritance, and land. For the rank and file, qualifications were less glamorous: a man needed skills or a trade, perhaps access to a family farm or workshop. A woman likewise would not be a good catch unless she too was known to be hard-working, skilled, healthy, and capable of cooking, gardening, caring for animals, milking, sewing, and innumerable other responsibilities. Just as we don't want new coworkers who have to have their hands held through every new job responsibility, our ancestors didn't want spouses who couldn't hit the ground running. Character and good standing in the community counted for a lot, too, although men and women were held to different standards. Ideally a new spouse would also bring good connections. Perhaps a new bride's family had grazing rights that the husband's family would now be entitled to share. Maybe a new husband's family owned a shipping barge, meaning expansion possibilities for the bride's family business.

All these things were important in a spouse. Love was not. Our foremothers and forefathers didn't expect to be in love, or even to fall in love, with their spouses any more than we expect to find an instant best friend in a new coworker. A wife was not a man's best friend, let alone his lover. All the way up to the turn of the twentieth century it was typically considered shameful to treat one's wife “as one would a mistress.” Spouses had a purpose, but the purpose was primarily pragmatic. Colonial American preacher John Cotton was plainspoken about the utility of the marital relationship: “Women are Creatures without which there is no comfortable Living for man . . . it is true of them what is wont to be said of governments,
that bad ones are better than none.
” Yet Cotton did not regard wives themselves as a utility to be taken for granted. “They are a sort of Blasphemers then who despise and decry them and call them
a necessary Evil,
” he continued, “for they are
a necessary Good;
such as it was not good that man should be without.”[
3
] Men needed wives; women needed husbands. The relationship was reciprocal, interdependent, and mutual. As teammates, they could expect to grow to know one another well and, with some luck, become fond of one another. But their primary job was not to be affectionate. Their job was to start, run, maintain, and support a new branch of the family.

But of course coworkers do sometimes fall for one another, and
some married couples did too. The evidence for this is not always crystal clear. Praise for a spouse engraved on a tombstone, for instance, might or might not reflect the existence of an affectionate relationship between spouses while both were alive. It does seem, however, that at least some married men and women experienced the kind of emotional and erotic combination platter we refer to when we talk, these days, about “being in love.” But they were not necessarily in the majority, and neither was passionate emotion for a spouse always seen as a good thing. Plutarch, the great chronicler of the late Roman republic, repeatedly ridiculed the legendary military leader Pompey for his “effeminate” public displays of affection for his fourth wife (and Julius Caesar's daughter), Julia. This wasn't merely Roman machismo talking, but a demonstration of an ideal that persisted for well over fifteen hundred years. Historian Marilyn Yalom describes the ideal of marital affection throughout most of Western history as being “affection in harmony with duty and reason.” As the
Lady's Magazine
lectured its English readership in 1774, “The intent of matrimony is not for man and his wife to be always taken up with each other, but jointly to discharge the duties of civil society, to govern their families with prudence, and educate their children with discretion.” Even in the eighteenth century, as the idea that affection and even passionate love might have a role to play in marriage was coming into a general if often grudging acceptance, such things were understood to be acceptable only within limits.

As difficult as it may be for us to believe today, particularly if we have had the seemingly involuntary, overwhelming experience of “falling in love,” anthropological and historical evidence both suggest that falling in love is not actually something human beings are hard-wired to do but a behavior pattern that is learned. In cultures where there is no significant cultural pattern of experiencing romantic love, most people do not. Such a pattern did ultimately develop in the West, but for most of our history it was not part of the everyday experience of the average person.

It should not, therefore, be surprising that the question of whether love should have any meaningful role in people's lives, and particularly in their marriages, could be hotly controversial.
Romeo and Juliet,
as we moderns sometimes must be reminded, is a
tragedy.
Early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was not alone in her sentiments when she wrote,
in her 1792
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
“Love is, in a great degree, an arbitrary passion, and will reign like some other stalking mischiefs, by its own authority, without deigning to reason. . . . In the choice of a husband [women] should not be led astray by the qualities of a lover—for a lover the husband, even supposing him to be wise and virtuous, cannot long remain.” Not for nothing did phrases like “he who marries for love has good nights and bad days” and insults like “cunt-struck,” the eighteenth-century equivalent of saying that someone was thinking with his dick, survive into the Victorian age.

Romantic passion, in other words, was not always, and certainly not automatically, considered a reasonable basis on which to base a marriage. But in order for romantic love to even be an option as a requirement for marriage, another door had to be opened first: unmarried people had to be routinely permitted to choose their own marriage partners for their own reasons.

This seemingly elementary step, so basic to the way we think about marriage today, radically transformed the institution. Anthropologists and historians refer to this as the shift from “traditional”—marriages arranged primarily for social and economic reasons—to “companionate” marriages. “Companionate” marriages are based on companionship between partners, including the idea that both members of a married pair should be at least emotionally well-disposed toward one another.

Companionate marriage arguably grew out of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, himself a former Augustinian monk, thoroughly dismissed the elemental Catholic contention that virginity and celibacy counted for more in terms of holiness and virtue than the married state. He also believed that marriage was good for more than just what traditional Catholic theology claimed for it, namely the production of legitimate children and the avoidance of fornication. Protestants, very much including Martin Luther, argued that marriage was a holy state in and of itself. Using the example of Adam and Eve, he argued that marriage was part of God's intention for humankind.