Ten years ago I was on the phone with my friend Bill, talking about what it was like to be a sex educator, and I said, “The longer I do this, the more convinced I am that there’s no such thing as normal.”
Ten years ago.
I’m now approaching my 10,000 hours mark as a sex educator, and I’m feeling increasingly confident about this thought. It’s something I’ve said on the blog – uh, at least twice.
But what are we going to do about it, dearies? Here’s the rub: the whole CONCEPT of “normal” is misapplied to sexuality, and yet the most common question I am asked is some variation on “Am I normal?” The answer is virtually always, “Yes,” yet people virtually always feel totally unhelped by that answer. They want to know how they compare to others, as though others’ sexuality provides any kind of meaningful metric for one’s own sexuality.
So I’ve just read Blink and Outliers, both by Malcolm Gladwell. Normality is, I think, something Gladwell explores in different ways in all his books. And maybe one point he makes could be an answer to the “normal sex” problem. Here’s an important bit:
(Watch the whole thing. It’s worth it.)
Horizontal segmentation.
There is no mustard hierarchy, no spaghetti sauce hierarchy… and no sexual hierarchy.
Waddaya think?
Not the perfect “sex,” the perfect “sexes.” Sex to appeal to vast diversity of human tastes, inclinations, and preferences. Zesty pickles, visible solids in your spaghetti sauce, and spanking, if you like.
I mean, with pickles, spaghetti sauce, and cola, we have preferences, right, and we can even build identities around those preferences. It’s also true that our preferences can change over time, and our identity changes with them. And sometimes you don’t know what you want until you TASTE it.
So far so good, right? Just like sex.
Let us “confront the notion of the Platonic dish,” or, in this case, the Platonic sexuality. There is no “form of the good” for sex. There are only sexes. I love it!
But there’s a snag, see. The immediate inclination when you think about “sexes” is to sort out some sort of heuristic for sexuality, to break folks up into “sex clusters,” like the coffee clusters in the video.
And we kind of HAVE clusters (gay, masculine, feminine, straight, bi, kinky, vanilla, etc etc), and look how well that works. Not at all well, I mean to say. There’s just too much diversity; we’d need a heuristic with so many different categories it would hardly be worth paying attention to. Categories are a failure with regard to sex, and don’t we end up putting those clusters on a hierarchy, which defeats the purpose?
But humans, we NEED categories. It’s our shortcut, quick-and-dirty way of making sense of the world.
Hell, what’s the answer? I don’t know, I don’t know.
There’s no such thing as normal. But there’s also hardly any such thing as abnormal, ya know? And even worse, there’s not even a good system for horizontally segmenting human sexuality. It’s just a mess, a chaotic, teeming swarm of hormones and bodies and ideas. Here we all are, and what are we going to do about it, as Peter Wimsey says.
Sort this out, would you, and let me know what you come up with. There’s no such thing as normal. Stop worrying about it and just enjoy the sex you’re having, even if it’s just with yourself. Be your own cluster. Discuss.
Makes me wonder if certain professions lend to specific sexual tastes like porn stars or sex educators.
Fuck yes.
Well, spaghetti has categories. There’s angel hair and penne and vermicelli and even soba or udon. There’s nothing wrong with hierarchy or categorization. What’s wrong is the silly idea that if you enjoy a certain sex (like sex with a bio-cock or sex with your tongue while your hands are tied o whatever) that you won’t, can’t, or shouldn’t like another kind of sex. That’s like saying just because you enjoy penne pasta you should never have the option of tasting bow-ties.
And that’s stupid.
Wow, that’s a subtle point, maymay! We can categorize sex without categorizing people. So rather than describing my sexual tastes by saying “I’m this kind of person,” I can say “I like these kinds of sex,” instead.
Categorizing a person’s entire sexuality can then be seen to be difficult merely in the same way that categorizing a person’s entire palate would be difficult. Sure, I can give you broad indicators of the food I like — not too much salt, I like vegetables, mildly spicy is OK — but you can’t deduce from that whether I prefer the zesty pickles. Similarly, I can tell you that I like sex with men, and I tilt submissive, but I’m not that kinky, and that tells you something, but you can’t deduce from that whether I like my clitoral stimulation strong or delicate.
Yup. Exactly. The questions still need to be asked. I realize that’s a lot more work than most people are willing to do. And that explains why there are “good lovers” and “bad lovers.” It’s the same reason why there are “good workers” and “bad workers.” The “good” ones do the work. The “bad” ones don’t bother.
We can, but we don’t. And I argue we shouldn’t have to. Categorizing people is okay (we do it ourselves for good reasons, like speed or belonging), but not always helpful or even relevant. That’s the subtlety I’m trying to get at, anyway.
Emily’s post got to it, too, in different words. So, in other words, it takes all types.
Diversity is sexy.
Great column!
Yeah, we DO need categories, for sanity and sorting, sure, but for practical reasons too. We just have the wrong categories.
“I’m a lesbian!” “He’s gay!” “They’re vanilla!” “I can’t stand bi men.” Handy sorting, but it isn’t about sex. It’s about social things that range from tribal membership to justification for hate.
What would it be like if we sorted like this?
# Procreative sex and associated childrearing
# Social-, political-, and financial status-related (e.g., married, sex work, one night stand, FWB, poly . . .)
# Play (almost ALL actual sex, from flirting to fetishes to romantic love and everything — and I DO mean everything — in between.
If somebody wanted to belong to the Het Club or the Lesbian Latins, let ‘em. Just nobody has to take it more seriously than Kiwanis or subscribing to Mad Magazine.
Just thinkin’.
maybe it helps to think of them along the lines, “all models are wrong but some models are useful.” one reason why constructing categories and hierarchies in sexuality might be useful is because it allows us to stigmatize things like pedophilia or zoophilia.
If I may take that last sentence and turn it around slightly, “One reason why constructing categories and hierarchies in sexuality is so pervasive is because it allows people to stigmatize sexual behaviors they disapprove of.” Don’t get me wrong: I disapprove of pedophilia and (to a lesser degree) zoophilia too, but my point is that the argument generalizes, and is, I believe, the root of the whole problem the post is addressing. We have these rigid categories, and an unfortunate tendency to make them hierarchical, because as a culture we haven’t shaken off our religious/Platonic heritage that says sex is probably dangerous and suspect at best. Those of us who are comfortable with our own sexuality have often dealt with this by compartmentalizing: “My kind of sex is good, but that kind over there (gay, kinky, nonmonogamous, whatever) is still bad.” The categories need to be rigid so that a thoughtless moralist doesn’t have to worry that she might ever be attracted to a woman, doesn’t have to identify with women who are. Because they’re a totally different kind of person, y’see.
Even sexual behaviors that are wrong (sex with children, sex with animals, cheating) need to be condemned not in terms of the desire, but in terms of the surrounding circumstances. In the first two cases, it’s a question of consent; in the third, a question of honoring one’s commitments. Stigmatizing the desire itself isn’t going to help anyone in the long run.
Great post, by the way. I’m reminded of a favorite Greta Christina post where she talks about viewing sexual preferences like musical tastes. Basically the same idea: tastes differ, none are inherently superior to others, and while people may fall into a general category, these are fluid rather than fixed.
I can definitely see what you mean about needing models so we can sort things out in our minds. I’m assuming here that we want the model to be accessible to everyone, whether alone at their computer/with their book/at a seminar, etc. Problem is, in order to sort it out so that two people can be getting the *exact* same information before interpreting it, we need a method of visually representing them…. the ven diagram for that one would be ABSOLUTELY mind-boggling, if not impossible!
Perhaps we could assign each characteristic its own shade and the intensity its own saturation (apologies to anyone who knows more about visual design than me if I’ve got these terms incorrect), and come up with a final color to describe an individual’s particular sexuality once all are added together. Then again, even with infinite color combinations, there would still be overlaps where different tones were added together and exactly the same color achieved.
“All models are wrong, but some models are useful” is exactly true when applied here. If we can’t create a foolproof model, we can’t create an absolute definition. We can say something is more common or less so, but we cannot define “normal” in any way.
I’m hesitant to use the phrase “stigmatize” in relation to anything because I try to take an amoral approach to things like this. It’s still possible to categorize things as more or less deviant with this approach, though.
**Some how I set out here to make my own commentary here, but what I think I’ve done is validate both your point and Emily’s
Excellent post. The desire for others to authenticate any of our choices as “right”, “OK” or normal, stems from a basic lack of trust in our own judgement. (A whole ‘nother conversation as to why that happens.) From my perspective, normal behavior would just mean it doesn’t hurt me or anybody else. I’ll have the spicy, please!
Stop worrying about it, indeed. It’s diminishing these days as real sex info gets more prevalent on the web, but in the early days of my sex blogging career, people who mistook my “sex blogger voice” for actual expertise on sexuality (whoops) were constantly posting comments and sending me emails, all on the theme of “am I normal?”
And all I could tell them was, well, yes and no — you’re a unique and special snowflake, you, and so is everybody else, and there is no normal, and excellent thanks for that or gosh how boring would it be?
I am trying to reach people who have been taught a bunch of thou shalt nots about sex in churches and believe them. Far too many people make up their own religion and then claim support in the bible for it.
I recently had a pastor’s wife take me on for my articles on How to Have Pleasurable Anal Sex and Giving Your Husband a great blow job. She found some dictionary that claimed that oral sex and anal sex of any persuasion was sodomy. I explained to her that anal sex was only forbidden to men in homosexual relationships, not to married couples. I further pointed out that the bible did not forbid oral sex at all. She went on to explain that the Bible forbids masturbation which it clearly does not. I challenged her to provide scriptural proof to which she then banned me from her site rather than answer my question. I had also explained to her that Hebrews 13:4 says that the marriage bed is undefiled in all which means that anything that you want to do with your husband is okay in the Bible’s eyes. I am teaching sex positive messages from the bible instead of the thou shalt nots.
Are you a member of AASECT?
Blessings on you and yours
John Wilder
Teaching sex-positive messages from the bible is a really interesting approach, John. I’m going to be perusing your site to see what else I can glean from your work; definitely interesting stuff.
For what it’s worth, you may find my short blog post, “What if the Ten Commandments were affirmative instead of negative?” up your alley. So to speak.
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