HETEROFLEXIBLE?

Chris sends me a mind-reeling article from the WaPo on the subject of teen sexualilty. Excerpting it is difficult, as one anecdote builds on another, and they all twist around the reactions of old-line gays and gay rights activists (who are mostly the same people, naturally).

And that's the word that seems to come to mind--naturally--when reading this article. Gays have long argued that they got that way naturally, and had no say in the matter. They were born that way, it was genetic, and so forth.

Other have argued one way or another that it's mostly a choice, or at least partly a choice, to be gay. Certain aspects almost certainly are--it can't be genetic for gay men to place ads for anonymous sex in newspapers, yet that's in fact what some of them do, a practice that has had more influence on the rise of AIDS than anything any President did or did not do. Others lead more conventional, monogamous lives. I once caught a John Waters speech--he's the iconoclastic film director who happens to be wildly, openly gay. Waters can spin out a funny story, but in his speech he pretty loudly denounced the idea of gay marriage because it's just too pedestrian and normal. He wanted no part of it. That was his choice on the matter.

And that's the other word that comes to mind--choice--when touching on gay issues. Is the basis of being gay, attraction to members of the same sex, a matter of choice or not? It would seem on the surface that it is, but then again you can come around from an entirely different angle: Who in their right mind would choose to follow a lifestyle that typically wrecks families and shortens life (for males) by a couple of decades? If humans were entirely rational, which we are not, no one would choose to be gay on their own. Which leaves the door open to gayness being a reaction to environmental stimuli, sort of a middle ground between choice and biology. But if it's mostly environmental, what does that do to the gay rights movement?

Nature, or choice?

Naturally comes back to mind, though, when looking at the WaPo article that inspired this post. It details the lives of teenage girls who call themselves some variant of "heteroflexible," by which they mean that today they're attracted to girls, yesterday they liked boys, and who knows who they'll find attractive tomorrow. Both? Neither? Some of them act out in very public, even exhibitionistic ways. Some of them are all too comfortable with a lifestyle that just a few years ago was seen as radical, subversive, and more than a little weird, and which at their young age they probably do not fully understand.

But in the past few years we have destroyed the taboos against gay and lesbian relationships. Gay issues are all over the sitcoms and movies, there was the whole Britney-Madonna thing, and in general attitudes toward gays and their relationships are in the midst of a massive surge in popular thinking. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has even found some Constitutional justification for gay marriage in the Republic's foundation, which would surely have surprised the men who built that foundation.

So more girls are either becoming, or acting like they're becoming, lesbians. Or "heteroflexible." Whatever.

Well, naturally they are. The taboo is gone; the cost to being a lesbian is much lower than it once was. There may in fact be no apparent cost to today's teens. According to the linked article, some "lesbian" teens even make money getting boys to pay them to kiss other girls in front of them. The cost-benefit calculus to being lesbian has, for them, swung toward benefit so much that they can literally make money on it, ergo, they at least outwardly become gay. Follow the money. Though it's interesting that no girls pay boys to kiss one another. Gay men have always had it rougher than gay women.

But if all the various cultural influences lead naturally to an upswing in openly lesbian relationships among the teen set, what does this say about the nature of the relationships themselves? It would seem that you can still arrive at two opposing conclusions, depending on your starting point.

The first would be that the relationships are a matter of choice. Gayness, or gayishness, is the going fad. That's even suggested in the story, by the girls themselves. If that's the case, it's obviously a choice-driven movement. They're following sexual trends they way they pick out new clothes and shoes (or the way boys pick out new cars, etc). This argues that gayness itself is at least strongly influenced culturally, raising the spectre of choice. And if that's the case, the whole biological argument for gay rights crashes to earth. And according to the story, this has old-line gay activists worried. Naturally.

But.

One could also argue that today's more open environment leads to more open experimentation, to more openness about that experimentation, and ultimately to more "gayness" in society--because we know about more gay relationships today than we once did.

So where you arrive in all this depends to a great extent on where you started. If you were a choice proponent before, you're likely to be even more of one after reading about the heteroflexible girls in today's high schools. The girls themselves make very rational cost-benefit arguments for going gay--girls are better listeners, will treat other girls more equally than boys typically do, etc. Those arguments are rooted in choice--the girls look at two alternatives, weigh the pros and cons, and choose. But if you were on the biological side before, you're likely to chalk it all up to the more open environment of today exposing more and more gay and lesbian experimentation and relationships.

One thing is clear from all this: Remove one taboo, and more follow, and the effect it all has on society is both unpredictable and inevitable. The taboo on homosexuality, which was until the early 70s considered a treatable mental illness, is dead. And society is changing, with our kids growing up in a world that most of us would have found alien when we were their age just a few short years ago.