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Are Humans by Nature Bisexual?
From: Columbia University
| By:
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Are humans by nature bisexual? Noted writer and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Ph.D., journeys back through time and poses this question to four sexologists, including Freud and Kinsey, relating their responses and noting developments in language, thought and politics. |
 re humans "by nature" bisexual? I feel compelled to say right away that the question as it stands is unanswerable. Even to ask it, I had to put the words "by nature" in postmodern punctuation to signal that we all understand how very modernist and outdated it is to speak of human nature. But the question is problematic for another historical reason: the word "bisexuality" is, as we speak, in the process of changing meaning--as it has done many times since its invention at the turn of the last century. Trying to answer the question simply, I might just spin word wheels. |
With just this much acknowledgment that my question is complicated, I am going to work along with it slowly anyway, exploring its complexity. I hope to show that we human beings are at a fascinating historical juncture in which we are struggling to appreciate the complexity and variability of our human sexuality. We are also struggling to overcome another kind of prejudice, which has been with us for more than a millennium--"erotophobia," fear of the erotic, fear of sexuality. |
While they have been the subject of scientific study, the complexity and variability of human sexuality were repeatedly grasped and then promptly denied. From every disciplinary direction and in all kinds of cultural venues, people are now realizing how often that has been the case in the last century. |
Category shift
Now the categories in which human sexuality has been scientifically circumscribed are breaking up. We are in a category shift, and I want to argue that bisexuality has been the category shifter. Bisexuality never quite fit with any of the general categorical schemes for thinking about sexuality. |
Further, the word "bisexual" itself is being transformed; I think it is turning into something like "multisexual." I suggest that term because it can evoke another neologism, "multicultural," and is a possibility, a virtue, that we hope for in the global millennium. (Already there are among us many celebrators of multisexualism or multisexual diversity.) |
In order to visit the history of scientific thought about bisexuality in the last 100 years, I'll put the question "Are human beings by nature bisexual?" to four different experts from four different eras. |
The fin-de-siècle sexologists
Let's pretend it is 1900 and we have before us a distinguished panel of sexologists, a new type of scientist. Some have backgrounds in biology and medicine. Others are from psychiatry. All have taken seriously Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. All have studied the pioneering work within their own emergent specialty, Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886. |
Not all the men (there are no women in this new field) on our panel would agree with Krafft-Ebing's key causal idea that hereditary degeneration--rather than environmental influences like childhood seduction--causes sexual pathologies. But, whether they were congenitalists or environmentalists (as the advocates of nature and nurture were then called), the sexologists would reply to our question in chorus: "Yes, all human beings are by nature bisexual." They would cite as evidence the following:
- Invertebrates and many lower vertebrates are bisexual (and sometimes reproductively hermaphroditic, as in the case of some flatworms and fishes).
- The knowledge that human embryos differentiate sexually only after the 12th week of their gestation is universally accepted.
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All our informants would then go on to describe various forms of anatomical hermaphroditism in human beings as reversions to the ancestral bisexual type. Krafft-Ebing himself had contributed the idea to sexology that same-sex sexual desire or homosexuality is "psychical hermaphroditism"--that is, a disturbance in the psychical sphere completely analogous to reversion in the anatomical sphere. |
Changing terminology
Krafft-Ebing--like the whole first generation of sexologists and Freud--considered the universal condition of bisexuality to stand revealed in all people who are not "monosexual" (a term that later theorists would replace with the neologism "heterosexual"). Among turn-of-the-century sexologists, homosexuality meant bisexuality. By the same token, heterosexuality was monosexuality. All fully developed or evolved people were heterosexual/monosexual. |
The Darwinian sexologists shared the conviction that human beings start out like the lower vertebrates and the other mammals in their bisexuality and then refine themselves through their development. They become specialized heterosexuals to best serve the reproduction of their species. |
Biological determinism and politics
For most of his career, Krafft-Ebing believed that homosexuality was a degenerative condition, a disease. As a result, he felt that homosexuals should not be prosecuted by legal agencies or churches, that they should not be held responsible for an inherited condition. Biological determinism could be, in this sense, a progressive political position, as it was for Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a pioneer homosexual theoretician and advocate for legal reform who had famously described homosexuals as "a feminine soul in a male body" or a "masculine soul in a female body." Biological bisexuality explained the feminine man and the masculine woman--the two prototypes of "the homosexual" for all the late-nineteenth-century scientists. |
Freud on bisexuality
Let me go forward in time to 1920 and consult Freud and his followers. I have chosen this date to take into account the fact that Freud's view of bisexuality evolved after 1900. He had developed his psychoanalysis in the years following 1900, and had also distanced himself from early associates like Wilhelm Stekel, who specialized in the theory that homosexuality is a pathology. |
The record of Freud's evolving view can be found in the additions and footnotes he made to all the editions of the text he wrote in 1905, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The record there shows that Freud usually appreciated the complexity and variability of human sexuality. But he could also lapse into being a monosexualist in the Krafft-Ebing tradition--demonstrating that human beings' theories about sexuality are just as complex and variable as sexuality itself. |
Object choice
Freud had started out with the Krafft-Ebing idea (that homosexuality is a reversion to the original bisexuality), but by the 1920s his attention shifted more and more to the psychological domain from the biological domain. His clinical observations had taught him that all people, regardless of their particular physical or sexual constitutions, make bisexual object choices. As he said summarily: |
It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are, human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either sex without the one trend interfering with the other. We call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without wondering much at it. But we have come to know that all human beings are bisexual in this sense and that their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form. |
The implications of this thought were enormous. Freud rejected the idea that homosexuals are "feminine souls trapped in male bodies" or "masculine souls trapped in female bodies." Instead, he insisted that all souls chose both same-sex and opposite-sex objects. Over time, however, and through a process of repression, most people chose one sex or the other predominantly and manifestly, that is, consciously. Meanwhile, they retain in their unconscious minds the road not taken. Not all desires and choices are evident in behavior; but more are evident in the bisexuals--who are in less conflict and who do not repress so relentlessly. |
All human beings are by nature bisexual, in Freud's view. They are bisexual both biologically and psychologically, that is, in terms of object choice. But Freud went even further and realized that the psychological domain is not just a domain of object choice. |
Gender identity
The psychological domain, Freud realized, is a domain of what we would now call gender identity. It is made up of:
- How a person feels and imagines himself or herself to be in terms of maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity.
- How a person is in relation to prevailing conventions about what is masculine and feminine.
In this domain, too, we are all bisexual in the sense that we are all a mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics. Some of those characteristics--like activity and passivity, perhaps--are closer to the biological domain. Others are more social or conventional. |
Balancing the domains of sexuality
In an essay that he wrote in 1920, Freud distinguished three domains that make up an individual's sexuality:
- Physical or biological characteristics (maleness and femaleness).
- Mental sexual characteristics (masculinity and femininity).
- Kind of object choice.
These three domains of bisexuality vary independently--to one degree or another--in every individual. |
In effect, Freud was acknowledging that varying mental characteristics in people could lead to similar object choices by the same people. For example, one predominantly male person who takes males as his predominant sexual objects may have predominantly masculine mental characteristics. Another male with the same object choice may have predominantly feminine mental characteristics. These are two different sorts of males behaving homosexually, the products of two different developmental routes and object-choice histories. |
Freud set himself to studying developmental differences, using concepts like identification and noting that some men identify more with men and masculinity, some more with women and femininity. The process of identification--a process of ego shaping--was salient in Freud's thoughts about development at this period in his work. It was more salient than the process of ego control over or repression of libidinal drives, which had been central to his thoughts in 1900. |
Freud's legacy
To recapitulate, Freud studied how human beings begin; how, when their egos are emergent, they attach themselves bisexually; and how they then limit themselves over time, as their egos mature and become shaped. All human beings, according to Freud, become delimited in their identities and their object choices, and all are in mourning for roads not taken. |
One of the key consequences of Freud's radical view that all human beings are bisexual all their lives was that he was against separating homosexuals (or bisexuals) off for study as a distinct group. He wrote, "Psychoanalytical research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating homosexuals off from the rest of mankind as a group of special character." Until quite recently, no one in the later Freudian tradition took this statement of Freud's as seriously as he did. Rather, the Freudian heirs were more impressed by the idea that homosexuality is not heterosexuality, which they saw as the normal outcome of development. |
Kinsey and sexual response
The post-Freudian for whom Freud's radical lesson rang truest was not a psychoanalyst. Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist. Kinsey's tendency to think as a student of animal behavior is obvious in the metaphor that frames the most famous passage in his very famous book, published in 1948, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental law of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories.... The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. |
Kinsey caused a sensation. His method of study was to interview hundreds of men--and, later, women--asking them about their sexual responses to other human beings and about their sexual behavior, not about their biology or their mental sexual characteristics. The result was astonishing, even to Kinsey. |
The Kinsey scale
In the various male interview samples Kinsey studied, he found that between 25 and 50 percent were in some way and to some degree behaviorally bisexual. That is, they admitted to engaging in both heterosexual and homosexual sex to the point of orgasm. Kinsey ranged these respondents on a scale from a group who had had only heterosexual experiences to a much smaller group that had had only homosexual experiences. This scale came to be known as the Kinsey scale. |
Kinsey's answer to the question "Are all human beings by nature bisexual?" would have been, consequently, a complex "Yes and no." He recognized that human beings as a species may possess the capacity to react to same-sex as well as opposite-sex stimuli and that this is their mammalian heritage. But a certain number of the species do react only to same-sex or only to opposite-sex stimuli--whether the reasons are biological or cultural. |
Kinsey recognized--as did Freud--that it is a fallacy to think that people are their behaviors, that behaviors and identity are the same. Thus Kinsey recommended:
Instead of using [heterosexual and homosexual] as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds.
This clarification also explains why Kinsey did not say that 25 to 50 percent of his samples were "bisexuals." That would have been just another misleading substantive or adjective. |
Kinsey's legacy
After the initial shock they caused, Kinsey's results and his tolerant attitude had little effect upon the intolerance and ignorance that were characteristic of Americans in the 1950s and 1960s (before the women's liberation movement). The majority of the population continued to do as Kinsey's respondents had done. They continued to be much more complex and variable in their acting than in their thinking. They continued to deny the discrepancy between the complexity and variability of their sexuality and the rigidity of the legal codes and religiously framed prohibitions they lived under. Nonetheless, until the 1970s Kinseyan research did dominate the little field of sexology. |
In fact, Kinseyan research became more and more refined and complicated. Designed to elicit more kinds of information than Kinsey had sought, questionnaires grew more nuanced. His successors focused particularly on the second of Freud's domains, which--thanks to the feminist theorists who began to inspire the Kinseyans--we now call gender identity. |
At the same time, Kinsey's stricture on the use of the terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual" as substantives was reinforced by a generation of historians of sexuality, most important among them Michel Foucault. Foucault pointed out that these terms had only come into existence in the late 1860s, and were very much the product of the turn-of-the-century social and cultural conditions that had supported the Krafft-Ebing disease model for explaining homosexuality. |
The gay liberation movement
Sex researchers and historians appreciated Kinsey's stricture on the terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual"--and, implicitly, "bisexual." The stricture posed a problem, however, for political activists. In the late 1960s, activists in the emergent gay liberation movement recognized Kinsey's influence on researchers who furthered the empirical task of demonstrating that homosexuality is not a pathology, not a disease, and not a reversion to a more primitive bisexual state of the species. They used Kinseyan research to press the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality as a diagnostic category. |
The homosexuals who worked for this change were also seeking affirmation of their lives and lifestyles. This meant that they did not try to destroy the substantive "homosexual." Instead, they identified themselves as a distinct group seeking equality. Homosexuals saw themselves as a group with a history and a culture distinct from that of their oppressors (now called homophobes or heterosexists). Homosexuality became an identity, and "Gay is good" was its slogan--comparable to "Black is beautiful." |
Importantly, "bisexuality" was not part of the definition. Once again, now for political reasons, there were but two kinds of sexuality, homosexuality and heterosexuality, gay and straight. |
Biological researchers and "sexperts"
In the context of the remarkably effective gay liberation movement, the field of sex research itself began to organize along a continuum. At one extreme, there was a group exclusively dedicated to the biological investigation Kinsey had criticized. Their search was for the biological substratum that causes heterosexuality and homosexuality, the two kinds of sexuality. People in this group had varying purposes for their search. Some in this group felt that finding the biological substratum for homosexuality would lead, as Krafft-Ebing had hoped, to greater tolerance for people who could not be other than their biology dictated. Others of this group were looking for the biological substratum so that, with modern scientific therapies, homosexuality could be cured or eliminated. At the lunatic extreme of essentialism, there was a German researcher whose stated goal was an anti-homosexual eugenics. |
At the other end of the continuum, there is an enormous variety of those whom the lesbian comic writer Susie Bright calls "sexperts." These social constructivists call into question the category "homosexual," even if they are homosexuals and want to identify as such. As heirs to Kinsey and the historians of sexuality, sexperts have sought new ways to demonstrate or describe the origins and developments of "gender identity" and "gender roles"--the terms now given to socially constructed masculinities and femininities. As one sociologist sexpert put it, "Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct." |
The lesbigay movement
At the same time, there have come into the ranks of the gay liberation movement people who want the designation "bisexual." They self-identify as bisexual. On the one hand, they are committed to a struggle with the many gay and lesbian people who think bisexuality is only a transitional phase, a way station on the journey toward coming out as gay or lesbian. On the other hand, they are committed to a struggle with prejudiced people of many sorts who have the idea that bisexuals are a major conduit for transmission of HIV between population groups. |
Bisexuals' struggle for recognition is being helped by the fact that sexperts are now studying them and their place in the more inclusively named lesbigay movement, and are formulating the typical stages for their coming-out processes. In a growing autobiographical literature, bisexuals are also studying themselves in the way that gays and lesbians have done so brilliantly over the past two decades. |
Identity politics
This brief historical tour of sexologists, psychoanalysts, sex researchers and contemporary sexperts shows us that the study of biological bisexuality gave way to the study of heterosexuals and homosexuals as types of people defined by their object choice. This focus slowly yielded to an emphasis on object choices and behaviors, which are known now to be very diverse. |
This last moment, however, has become wrapped in identity politics. There is now both a great deal of identity claiming and a great deal of protest against restrictive or dichotomizing identity categories. There is also a surge of reactive homophobia and biphobia among people who are frightened by the deconstructing and blurring of sexual identities. Regardless of--but also influenced by--the fear that some people experience, and aided by politic impetus for growth, the century-old pursuit persists, and sexual categories continue to undergo transformation. |
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