Dr Paul McHugh – Sexuality and Gender

Copyright 2016. All rights reserved. Print copies available at TheNewAtlantis.com/BackIssues.

 

Part One: Sexual Orientation

 

sexual desires any more than we choose the objects of our other desires. It might be more accurate to say that we gradually guide and give ourselves over to them over the course of our growth and development. This process of forming and reforming ourselves as human beings is similar to what Abraham Maslow calls self-actualization.18 Why should sexuality be an exception to this process? In the picture we are offering, internal factors, such as our genetic make-up, and external environmental factors, such as past experiences, are only ingredients, however important, in the complex human experience of sexual desire.

Sexual Orientation

Just as the concept of “sexual desire” is complex and difficult to define, there are currently no agreed-upon definitions of “sexual orientation,” “homosexuality,” or “heterosexuality” for purposes of empirical research. Should homosexuality, for example, be characterized by reference to desires to engage in particular acts with individuals of the same sex, or
to a patterned history of having engaged in such acts, or to particular features of one’s private wishes or fantasies, or to a consistent impulse to seek intimacy with members of the same sex, or to a social identity imposed by oneself or others, or to something else entirely?

As early as 1896, in a book on homosexuality, the French thinker Marc-André Raffalovich argued that there were more than ten different types of affective inclination or behavior  captured by the term “homosexuality” (or what he called “unisexuality”).19 Raffalovich knew his subject matter up close: he chronicled the trial, imprisonment, and resulting social disgrace of the writer Oscar Wilde, who had been prosecuted for “gross indecency”
with other men. Raffalovich himself maintained a prolonged and intimate relationship with John Gray, a man of letters thought to be the inspiration for Wilde’s classic The Picture of Dorian Gray.20 We might also consider the vast psychoanalytic literature from the early twentieth century on the topic of sexual desire, in which the experiences of individual subjects and their clinical cases are catalogued in great detail. These historical
examples bring into relief the complexity that researchers still face today when attempting to arrive at clean categorizations of the richly varied affective and behavioral phenomena associated with sexual desire, in both same-sex and opposite-sex attractions.

We may contrast such inherent complexity with a different phenomenon that can be delineated unambiguously, such as pregnancy. With very few exceptions, a woman is or is not pregnant, which makes classification

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