Biology Fallback

Another item Slate's gay journalists, and William Saletan, enjoy using is the scientific measurement of autoerotic arousal as an indicator of bisexual repression. Here is Bering again:

Research has shown a positive correlation between a man’s loathing of gay men and his own repressed same-sex desires. “Since homosexual behavior violates both their moral code and their sense of identity,” explained the psychologists Donald Mosher and Kevin O’Grady long ago, “homosexual threat is experienced as men become aware at some level of their … arousal to homosexual stimuli. This awareness can be avoided by anger, disgust, and contempt directed against homosexuals, as a means of bolstering hypersexual identity.”



As a disabled woman whose survival has been threatened constantly as a matter of socio-economic status, I take issue with the correlation that gender identity is so arbitrary. Let me backtrack a little: I once loved my best friend Susan, and we were as emotionally intimate as a cripple and a promiscuous able-bodied blond could be, within platonic lines. I was devoted to her, in fact, before I told her, in university, to fuck off. I don't think I literally cursed her, but you get the drift. I never felt a homoerotic response toward her. What I felt was envy, a vicarious desire to have a body like hers that men wanted, and by the age of nineteen, my psyche revolted. I was tired of being the subordinate.

It took a supervisor I admired to threaten me, and yes, I was traumatized, and thought for many years "this meant I had to be bi."

Not necessarily. I confused my response. I was never physically attracted to Linda, and my grovelling may have been a tactic, but it was to restore livelihood, not to indulge in some homoerotic adventure. She is forever besmirched, and again, envied, and if I could I'd snap her in two, but not because of a repressed desire to get off with her, or cheer lead her, as I think she wanted me to do, but because she caused me a level of duress that could have had criminal liability as an end result.

Psychology is only a relevant predictor up to a point, and any aggressive reaction I feel toward the lesbian hits I've had to absorb is because I cannot defend myself. Can you?