Straight (22 page)

At the same time an increasing number of women, feminist-identified and not, began to treat heterosexuality as a buffet from which they could pick and choose. Vastly wider options for economic, legal, and reproductive autonomy, many the result of explicitly feminist effort, meant that women had more ability to decide which, if any, parts of the heterosexual system they wanted to partake of. Women who loved men could do so with or without marriage, if not necessarily without controversy. Marriage gradually became less of a requirement for forming a household, having and raising a child, and being part of a family. At the same time and for the same reasons, it also became easier for women to express their love of other women. Gay and lesbian rights organizations emerged out of similar ferment, seeking acceptance, liberty, and ideological and cultural change. Love was still important. It still carried a lot of expectations. But the horse and carriage of love and marriage had been uncoupled. Love roamed more freely without the bulky carriage in tow.

What
was
love, then? How did it work? What did it mean? Was it voluntary or involuntary, strategic or spontaneous? Was it universal, paying no heed to silly things like gender and sex, or was it somehow rooted in biology? Did it obligate certain behaviors—like marriage or having children—or was it complete in and of itself? It was harder
than ever to imagine love as being simple and inevitable, as God's imprimatur on a union between a man and a woman, or as evidence of a natural “magnetism” between opposites in a biological binary. There was simply no logic by which one could pin the whole apparatus of behavior, belief, and culture we like to call “heterosexuality” on something as variable, as mercurial, and as vexingly resistant to analysis as love.

We continue to wrestle with these questions. Our Disney Damage—or romantic novel damage, if you prefer—with its deep-seated longing to believe in love's transformational, life-perfecting magic, clashes with medical science that reveals love's euphoria to be the result of dopamine and norepinephrine, two chemicals produced by the brain when we fall in love or use drugs like cocaine. Our hopeful faith that shared love between women and men can be a foundation for egalitarian partnerships has to contend with our awareness that love is exploited on a daily basis when it is used to tether people to abusive and violent relationships. We spend billions yearly on the diets, gyms, clothes, cosmetics, and other accessories we use to make ourselves loveable, sexy, and attractive, and we spend millions of dollars and hours on therapy and rehab centers and meetings of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, desperate to shed our feelings of dependence and helplessness in the face of love.

As a culture, we are fairly sure that heterosexuality is natural, normal, and desirable, and that heterosexual love is among life's most validating and positive experiences. We organize heterosexuality around the principle of love now more than we have at any time in the past—the experience of romantic love is what legitimizes not only marriage, but separately legitimizes sexual activity and the having of children as well. Yet this love experience, this inherent part of heterosexual existence, it seems, can also be as anarchic, as fleeting, and as prone to slip out of our control as our ancestors warned us it would be. Perhaps this, as much as anything, explains the enduring fantasy allure of the happily-ever-afters of the Wonderful World of Disney, the moody sparkly-vampire love and angst of the blockbuster
Twilight
novels, and the shelves upon shelves of romance novels in every bookstore. Only in fiction and fantasy is the heterosexual “love adventure” something we can genuinely control, and therefore trust, regardless
of how hard we try to make our real-life heterosexuality in its image.

It was a stupendous thing, and at fifty pounds a night, in the late eighteenth century, it better have been. James Graham's Grand State Celestial Bed surrounded its occupants with “celestial and electrical fire,” serenaded them with music, tantalized them with “stimulating vapours,” and dazzled their eyes with a veritable forest of gleaming glass columns and a romantic canopy of flowers and caged turtle doves, all the better to spur them on to the very heights of love. The Celestial Bed was novel, but not new. There has always been an array of things—oysters, champagne, Spanish fly, heart-shaped hot tubs—that are supposed to goad us to the heights of sexual ecstasy. Technically speaking, there is no such thing as an aphrodisiac, a substance that incites sexual desire from nothing. But there is definitely such a thing as the placebo effect. The word “placebo,” Latin for “I shall please,” has been in medical use since the eighteenth century. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, and elsewhere in the anatomy too.

In the end, though, as the spendthrift Graham was rudely reminded when he went bust in 1784 and had to sell most of his belongings, a bed was only a bed. And indeed, today's ED (“erectile dysfunction”) drugs are only vasodilators. For many, their documentable effects are about the same as Graham's tilting, chiming, perfume-emitting temple to sexual intercourse: they work about as well as you believe they will. Research indicates that Viagra and its relatives in
the class of drugs called PDE5 inhibitors are effective at improving erections only among men who actually have pre-existing problems with blood flow to the penis.[
1
] Contrary to what many believe, PDE5 drugs cannot give healthy men harder or quicker erections than they would have otherwise, prolong orgasm, or intensify sexual sensation. Yet thousands of men every day shell out five dollars or more per dose for PDE5 drugs, with Pfizer alone making $466 million in Viagra sales in 2009. Weightlifters take them to try to mask the infamous dicklimpening side effects of steroid use, and men who take Prozac and other libido-dampening antidepressants sometimes resort to Father's Little Helpers. The CIA has even used Viagra to bribe Afghani warlords.[
2
] Since Viagra first became available in 1998, over 25 million men around the world have taken the aggressively marketed, aggressively priced, erection-promoting drug therapeutically, recreationally, and as a security blanket.[
3
] The drugs are perhaps the most frequently illegally marketed prescription pharmaceuticals in the world (as I wrote this paragraph, a spam e-mail arrived in my in-box, exhorting me to buy Viagra from a shady Internet pharmacy so I could “Be her CEO in Love Making!”). But for vast swathes of the men who take them, PDE5 drugs are—just like every other substance touted as an aphrodisiac since the dawn of time—objectively doing nothing much.

Viagra and its relatives are admittedly more pharmaceutically complicated than, say, oysters or champagne. But the majority of men who consume PDE5 drugs do not actually have the cardiovascular conditions that it alleviates, or suffer from vascular-related impotence. Even when they do, this isn't the main focus for someone who takes a PDE5 drug. These drugs are sold and taken as pleasure drugs. Pharmaceutical companies acknowledge this. Their ad campaigns for PDE5 drugs depict snuggling couples, suburban wives being swept off their feet, and, in the 2007 “Viva Viagra!” campaign, graying dudebros in a lamentably funk-free garage band, jamming about the joys of chemically enhanced sex. My favorite Viagra ad, a Spanish-language print ad I saw some years ago, simply shows an image of the distinctive blue pill with the text “Un divorcio menos. Gracias, Pfizer.” (“One less divorce. Thanks, Pfizer.”) The subtext, that a lack of husbandly erections meant a lack of pleasurable sex for the wife, and in turn a looming divorce, speaks volumes about the place of a particular version of sexual pleasure in our current version of heterosexuality.

Viagra might not seem to have a lot to do with sexual orientation. A drug is a drug, and works the same way on those who take it regardless of their sexual preferences or partners. But the model of pleasure that Viagra is marketed to serve has a great deal to do with sexual orientation. Viagra has only one major clinical use, which first appeared as a side effect when sildenafil was still in development: to create erections, the irreducible bona fide of male-identified sexual performance since before the first Paleolithic cave painter scrawled a phallus on a rock wall.[
4
] What they are marketing as generating and what they do in actuality generate—in the users for whom they are capable of generating anything at all—is the ability to perform a particular kind of sexual act. An erect penis can penetrate any orifice. But Viagra ads make it clear that Viagra-fueled erections are intended for vaginal penetration, the one distinctive act of “heterosexual sex” and the only fully legitimate source of sexual pleasure for most of Western history.

UNGUILTY PLEASURES

In a very real way, the hard penis
is
heterosexual sexual activity. In virtually every era, in virtually every culture we know, to be a sexually active male is to penetrate with the penis, and to be a sexually active female is to be penetrated by one. Not for nothing are lesbians sometimes raped by those who think it will convert them to a “correct” heterosexual appreciation for the penetrating penis. The medieval English take on it was that in sex, there are two partners, “the man that doeth and the woman that suffereth.”[
5
] This did not mean that the woman suffered pain or was made miserable by sex. It meant that the man, not the woman, engaged in sexual activity—he penetrated—while the woman merely permitted it to be done.

For most of Western history the penetration of the vagina by the penis was not merely the only sanctioned form of sexual activity between men and women; it also seems to have actually been the form of virtually all sexual activity between men and women. Prior to the eighteenth century we have only scant evidence of other types of sex acts taking place at all, and most of the evidence we have comes from medical or legal accounts in which nonintercourse acts are being framed as problematic, sinful, or illegal. This does not mean that none of our forebears experimented with, let's say, performing oral sex on one another. Undoubtedly some of them did. But the evidence
suggests that they probably didn't do so in great numbers or with great frequency.

We know very little, actually, about what kinds of sex most of our ancestors had, how they felt about it, or whether they had any intellectual concept of why they enjoyed the things they did. They did not, as a rule, spend a great deal of time woolgathering about the whys and wherefores of their own sexual experience. What we do know, from the law books, medical tomes, and religious texts that have survived, is that penis-in-vagina intercourse is the only source of sexual pleasure that has never, so far as we can tell from the historical record, been challenged.

No other specific sex act enjoys, or has ever enjoyed, universal approbation. No other source of sexual pleasure is as uniformly accepted, or has ever been. The fortunes of all other sex acts and all other sources of sexual pleasure have varied widely. Sex between males might've been acceptable to the ancient Greek elite, and is increasingly acceptable in much of the West today, but has certainly not always been seen as a permissible form of sex or a legitimate source of pleasure. Masturbation and mutual masturbation, anal penetration, and fellatio have been accepted at some times and in some places and not in others, even when performed by a different-sex couple. Cunnilingus, for reasons probably having to do with its lack of focus on the male's direct pleasure, has until quite recently indeed been considered at least déclassé and perhaps even a disturbing, feminizing perversion. But penetrating a woman's vagina with an erect penis and taking pleasure in that experience have never been perceived as anything other than understandable, natural, and indeed inevitable.

Even the Catholic Church fathers, despite their profound resentment of the body and its appetites, could not bring themselves to call for the outright abolition of penis-in-vagina intercourse. Because of its apparent compliance with God's reproductive will, it was the sole sexual act of which they could bring themselves to approve. The Christian party line on what sex was for, as Augustine phrased it, was “
proles, fides, sacramentum
”—children, faithfulness, and the sacrament of marriage. Pleasure did not officially enter into it. Church fathers like St. Clement recommended a cool, distant approach to sexual activity, engaging in sex out of reason, not out of desire. Pleasure might distract
the believer, or even tempt him into prioritizing the pursuit of sex over the pursuit of holiness. Ideally, a good Christian would think of sexual pleasure as merely a side effect of doing God's bidding to “be fruitful and multiply.” As the Church grew and its doctrine solidified, so did its attitude that sexual pleasure, even in sanctified, penetrative vaginal sex between the duly married, could be tolerated but not celebrated. And there the matter rested.

Or did it? In practice, Church influence and a healthy appreciation for the joy of sex existed side by side. People were no less complicated then than they are now, and our ancestors were more than capable of simultaneously believing in the Church's priorities and being enthusiastically interested in their own sexual pleasure. The perennial existence of prostitutes testifies to this, as do the reports we see of male same-sex activity. In fact, even though rulers were technically as strictly obligated to canon law as anyone else, governments occasionally used sexual pleasure as a carrot to motivate the public when the stick of legal action and religious condemnation had failed. Ruth Mazo Karras cites the example of Florence, Italy, which in 1403 commissioned an Ufficiali dell'Onesta, or Office of Honesty, to open an official municipal whorehouse.[
6
] Florentine officials of the time perceived the city as suffering from a sodomy epidemic. Their hope was that by offering Florentine men the option of the more legitimate pleasure of sex with women (even if they weren't married to them), they might give up the scandalously illegitimate pleasures of sex with men.