THAT'S MEN:Definitions of male and female are shifting
AS I WRITE this, Australia’s female tennis icon Margaret Court is at the centre of a storm over remarks in which she opposed gay marriage.
That her views created a storm is understandable in a country which, last autumn, announced that citizens would be allowed to list their gender as X on their passports if they did not want to be categorised as male or female.
Four years ago, a secondary school in Thailand announced that in future it would have three kinds of toilets – for girls, boys and transsexuals. The principal of the school said at the time that 10-20 per cent of the boys in his school regarded themselves as transgender. In other words, they would prefer to be girls.
All of this suggests that definitions of male and female, and the traditional idea that you’re either a man or a woman and that’s that, are shifting.
I also notice increasing debates on the internet about straight men who watch gay porn and what that might or might not mean about their sexuality.
By the way – and Margaret Court might be interested in this – one research project in the US found that homophobic men were more sexually aroused by gay porn than were men who were not homophobic. (How did they know? They sat them down, attached a scientific thingy to their penises and showed them various kinds of porn.)
This may mean that homophobic men are actually railing against their own latent homosexuality. On the other hand, there is also a theory that homophobic men watching gay porn experience heightened anxiety and that anxiety in the presence of a sexual stimulus leads to arousal.
Confused? Well, the real confusion lies in the fact that we have never fully figured out what exactly predisposes us to certain types of sexuality, homosexuality, heterosexuality or at any point in between.
Worse, we link behaviours with sexuality in ways that may not actually make sense. We may assume that an effeminate man is gay or that a macho man must be straight. But if you know enough men, you know that this assumption is often wrong.
It seems likely that sexuality in the sense of your sexual preferences for persons of your own or the opposite sex or both is very much determined by the time you are born. But behaviours might be more linked with culture than with genes.
Psychologist Margaret Mead’s study of tribes in New Guinea found one in which women looked after business and the gathering of food and men were judged as emotional creatures who shouldn’t be let near such serious matters; in another, both boys and girls were reared to be loving and gentle and to behave in ways which we might regard as feminine; in a third, both men and women were extremely aggressive and arrogant and were utterly impatient with child rearing.
In other words the behaviours you think make you a man probably have nothing unique about them and could as easily apply to women in another time or place.
Where does that leave us? Maybe we should adopt the old view of the Mojave Indians who categorised human beings into four genders. The first two were male and female in the traditional sense. The next two were men who wanted to live like women and women who wanted to live like men.
I suspect we will end up adopting a classification like this sooner or later. But such is the complexity of human sexuality and gender that even those classifications may not be enough.
When I was growing up, men were men and women were women and that was that. The only gay people in Ireland were David Norris, Hilton Edwards and Mícheál MacLiammóir. As regards the last two, nobody ever talked about them being gay and many people hadn’t even figured it out.
And that makes sense because the fact is you really, truly, cannot tell.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is accredited as a counsellor by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book,
Light Mind - Mindfulness for Daily Living
, is published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email.
