A few years ago, a good friend called me to deliver some news. “I met someone,” she nearly squealed into the phone, her excitement becoming contagious. But I noticed something else, a cautious edge to her voice. I inquired further, asking, “Who is this guy? Where’d you meet him? What’s his social security number?” but she continued to be vague, mumbling into the phone until I finally got something along the lines of, “Well…err…it’s, he, she…is kind of a girl.”
I was admittedly taken aback at first. The only thing I’d ever known her to find attractive was tall, dark and handsome. And, well, a guy. But other than that, the preference change didn’t really faze me. I’m an accepting person, and she was my best friend. When I asked her if this was something she’d known about for a while, I realized that I wrongly assumed that this was her coming out. I’d always seen sexuality as something fairly black and white, the way most people do. You’re either gay or straight. The most intriguing way she explained it to me was when she said, “It doesn’t feel like I’m starting to just like girls now or that I’m a lesbian or anything. I met someone that I liked, someone that I was attracted to and it happened to be a girl.”
As it turns out, this sentiment is not unusual and is in fact shared by several women in a book by Lisa M. Diamond, PhD entitled “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire.” Diamond is a professor of psychology at the University of Utah and has a Ph.D. in Human Development.
The book speculates around the idea of love truly being blind when it comes to gender—at least for women. Previous studies that explored the idea of sexuality as a permanent label were mostly based on men. And I think it can be agreed upon that in our society, men are labeled much more quickly than a woman when it comes to exploring different facets of their sexuality.
“I feel as though society has made it much more acceptable for women to experiment with their sexuality than they have for men,” said junior government and world affairs and criminology major Zachary Lancovino. “Society seems to allow a woman to flip back and forth, while a man is immediately labeled depending on what he does.”
The idea of sexual fluidity differs from that of bisexuality, which refers to equal attraction to both sexes. There is even some debate about the existence of bisexuality as a legitimate form of sexual preference. Fluidity isn’t as much about an equal attraction to both genders, but rather the unimportance of gender as a whole when it comes to love and desirability. It’s a fluctuation between homosexual and heterosexual preferences and behaviors that relate more to what someone has going on in their life and the person that they happen to meet at that time. But again, this experience isn’t something you are likely to hear a man going through without being subject to a large amount of scrutiny.
“I would think that it’s possible to go through those changes without being considered a lesbian or a straight woman,” said junior biology major Alanna D’Amelio about changes in sexual preference in a given woman’s lifetime. “I wouldn’t say women are more easily influenced, but we’re definitely more open with ourselves and our emotions compared to men. I feel as though for men there is a solid line between straight or gay but for women that line is not as thick.”
I don’t mean to say that women who are exclusively straight or exclusively gay don’t exist, because they do. Perhaps one of the largest differences about the idea of fluidity is that it becomes a choice, rather than an orientation that you were born with. But I can agree that the tendency of women to be more emotional creatures can lead them down different paths throughout their life, depending on what they’re going through and what their specific needs are at that time. That said, however, I also can’t help but wonder if men would be open to similar experiences if it wasn’t for society’s creation of a “solid line” and a label reading “gay” ready to be stamped on any man who crosses over the heterosexual line.
It seems to me that the center of love and relationships has become so focused on rules, what you can and cannot do and what gender you are doing it with that the actual point of it all has become obscured. At the end of the day, maybe love is truly better off being blind.
Hannah Webster can be reached at hannah.webster@spartans.ut.edu