Shaun de Waal : First Person
In last week’s First Person, the noted British feminist Joan Smith told us why women don’t cruise. But her answer seemed to have two parts: one explicit, one implicit. Danger, she said, is the main reason women don’t haunt parks and public toilets in search of sex. Underlying that, however, was the half-suppressed suspicion that in this respect men and women are perhaps just different.
The fleeting, furtive sex provided by cruising allows men to avoid intimacy, suggests Smith. And, whether or not they are doing it because they can’t openly admit their homosexuality or get sex elsewhere, it may even reinforce a sense of sex as shameful – “an essentially puritan view at odds with much feminist and radical theory”.
No right-thinking woman, Smith hints, would want this kind of sex at all. Maybe men, as Marilyn French suggested, are just more involved with power. Smith gives Bill Clinton as an example of a straight man who gets kicks from covert sex because it makes him feel powerful. This at least is an attempt to explain his urges, unlike the woman commentator who simply said she couldn’t understand why he should want fast food on the side when he has “filet mignon” at home.
Apart from the culinary metaphor’s insult to Monica Lewinsky and/or Hillary Clinton, it misses the point. Who says you can’t enjoy filet mignon as well as fast food? The latter has its own appeal – remember George Michael’s pre-bust hit song, Fastlove? (As a risky-sex junkie, he should know.) And what of the value judgment here? Are we all supposed to aspire only to gourmet home-cooking and forever give up the takeaways?
Wisely perhaps, Smith doesn’t go very far down this road. The issue of sexual exclusivity in a marriage-type relationship has long been a tricky one, and perhaps too many philandering men have made the equation of food and sex. More than one theorist has observed that straight men, if they could (that is, if women would co- operate), would probably have as much anonymous, casual sex as some gay men do. Look at the enduring appeal of prostitutes.
And not all cruising happens in potentially dangerous places – though parks may be safer for some than other areas. A lot of gay clubs provide dim zones designed as a safe space for quick, anonymous sex. Some lesbian clubs do the same. Either way, gay and lesbian clubs and bars provide a protected domain in which to pick up sexual partners – or, for that matter, to cruise for a lifetime mate.
Feminism was right, of course, to deny that biology is destiny, that just because women can bear children means they should automatically be confined to that role (and the adjacent chores of housework). But does that mean biology has no significance at all?
Maverick theorist Camille Paglia sees casual gay sex as quintessentially male, “the ultimate point on a track of intensifying masculinity shooting away from the mother”. In Paglia’s archetypal scheme, women are nature, men are culture. For civilisation to happen, nature must to some degree be thwarted. But still the tensions continue: “the masculine principle” will always struggle “to free itself from woman’s cosmic dominance”.
“Straight men who visit prostitutes,” she writes, “are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family – in other words, from society, religion and procreative Mother Nature.”
And, as for gay cruising, Paglia is unequivocal: “To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in prehistory, is anywhere you kneel.”
Sociobiologist Edward O Wilson makes the necessary disclaimers about the political ways such things can be manipulated, but he points to basic biological male/female differences which might determine behaviours: “The human egg is 85 000 times larger than the human sperm … The most important immediate result is that the female places a greater investment in each of her sex cells … [of which] a maximum of about 20 can be converted into healthy infants.” A man, however, “releases 100- million sperm with each ejaculation”.
The “resulting conflict of interest between the sexes”, says Wilson, is something we have in common with other mammals. And most of them don’t even enjoy sex. Sex as pleasure is a very human thing, but it has to be balanced by what one might call the sufficient monogamy necessary to stabilise society and perpetuate the species.
Women bear the children, a business more dangerous than any amount of cruising in dark parks, so they rightly demand the stability necessary to ensure their and their offspring’s survival (perhaps Paglia is wrong and women are the civilisers). Men, whose natural urge may be to spread that excessive sperm as widely as possible, have to compromise here, for the same reason.
But this, if true, doesn’t have to take us back to the old oppressions of women – or the repressions of the claustrophobic nuclear family. We need to take biology into account if we want to restructure society in more benign ways. As Wilson says, culture provides “plasticity”, and if humanity could endow our biology with restrictive old meanings, it is just as possible to give it new, liberating ones.