'Do you come here often?' 'Only in the mating season!'

I’m wondering if sexuality, sexual identity, sexual object choice, whatever we want to call it this week, may not be about genital sexuality at all for some people, but more about affective factors.

The Australian Study of Health and Relationships, to its credit, makes an attempt to distinguish between sexual identity (whether you label yourself bisexual, lesbian, gay, straight, etc) sexual attraction, and sexual experience (which they define as ‘any kind of contact with another person that you felt was sexual. It could be kissing or touching, or intercourse, or any other form of sex’). This does presuppose a fairly unproblematic kind of continuum, from sexual attraction to sexual experience, to sexual identity – albeit with the potential for disruption along the way – for example, reporting same-sex attraction but a heterosexual identity.

I wonder if this might be something of a masculinist model? Sex therapists have long reported the difficulties that arise for heterosexual couples, because female sexuality does not seem to work this way. They are continually reminding men that women require affection and non-sexual touching as a prelude to genital sexual activity. Is it possible that many women don’t experience sexual attraction in the same way that men do, that for them the emotional and affective factors play a much larger part in sexual behaviour than simple sexual attraction? Perhaps some individuals may be sexually active with people for whom they don’t actually feel any ‘sexual’ attraction, because sex is a part of the total relationship, not the reason for the relationship.

I’m conscious here of the frustration of talking about essentialising categories such as ‘men’ and ‘women’ when what I probably mean is, for example, ‘individuals with an XY pair of sex chromosomes who call themselves “men” and who do the kind of hegemonic masculinity prevalent in 21st century Australia’. I’m not saying there is some biological determinant that makes women value affective factors more than men do, I’m fully cognizant that this stuff may be socially constructed. Although I do wonder if having 10 times more testosterone in your system might be a factor in understanding why sexual attraction can be a lot more compelling for men than women. (Can you feel me wanting to start putting apostrophes around those terms? Scary, ain't it?)

What, after all, is ‘falling in love’? Do some of us only fall in love with people to whom we are sexually attracted? Do others fall in love with people to whom they are not sexually attracted at all? (Yes folks, I’ve just watched “De-Lovely”, the movie about Cole and Linda Porter). We hear laments about “lesbian bed death” but why should a relationship be considered invalid in some way simply because there is no genital sexual activity taking place? I think this is a hangover from the patriarchal discourse of marriage – an ‘unconsummated’ marriage can be annulled, because it’s not complete if a penis has not discharged sperm into a vagina. For me being a lesbian is first and foremost about being a ‘woman-identified woman’, about giving the best of myself, investing my emotional energy, into another woman, and having her do the same for me. Sex is one (very, very delightful) expression of that, but not the central principle by any means.