Sexual Roles Historically Stressed To Serve Society

By JILL TWEEDIE

The Manchester Guardian

LONDON — Inside my body there is a small being of indeterminate shape and no sex at all. The small being's fingers are permanently hooked over the inside ledge of my cheekbones and it peers through the peepholes of my eyes. At times it looks down at the outlines of the body to which it is attached with a distinct feeling of surprise at the odd protuberances. It has forgotten that it lives inside a female.

"Menstruating, gestating, giving birth, suckling are exclusively female experiences," according to a lady colleague. "Eating, drinking, sleeping, hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, are not. Is it conceivable that the femaleness of my body, the fact that it is structured for childbearing means that my senses transmit their messages to female brain cells which somehow dictate female responses? Do I perceive as a woman, think as a woman?…It is hard to believe so."

She illustrates the division in most of our activities and emotions fall into the no-sex category.

And yet, if this is a general human feeling, why is our sex of such overriding importance in our lives?

Could it be because sexual roles were, at first, so necessary — and not so profitable — to our society that they have become exaggerated to an entirely unnatural degree? An assumption of sexual roles is vital to produce children; to form the family that, in its turn, forms the basis of a property-owning structure. Have the needs of that structure inflated our sexuality to far grosser proportions than might have been normal for another sort of structure?

It is certainly significant that, throughout history, society has savagely attacked those who diverged from the sexual norm: Homosexuals, lesbians, transvestites — anyone, in fact, whose sexual practices did not conform to a pattern.

I think it likely that society has always perceived homosexuality as a threat because it could not be corralled to serve society.

Homosexuals do not produce children, they need not form consumer units (though they often do), nor do they offer training facilities for future men and women — boys taught to earn and organize, girls to bear children and service those boys. In a technological society homosexuals are still an irritant: Their liaisons cannot be taxes as a family unit is taxed, they do not easily come under the thumb of the state. They represent, in fact, not society's fear of perverted sex — but its fear of anarchy.

So it is not surprising that at a recent London street rally, Gay Liberation took the brunt of police action. Unlike its brother organizations, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) puts all its emphasis on "coming out," on the necessity for homosexuals to declare themselves and accept their sexuality as normal and good. In doing so, it poses an overt threat to a society that lives by proper serving women and property, aggressive, competitive men, a threat that is often disguised by being seen as a purely sexual manifestation — 'just a lot of queers trying to gain the freedom to practice sex the way they want it.'

No doubt there are many homosexuals, both in and out of GLF, to whom the movement is exactly that and they have every right to pursue this hope of sexual happiness, as do we all. But to think that this is the be-all and end-all is seriously to underestimate a quiet revolution of the most far-reaching kind.

Take some of the current activities of GLF. Because their "difference" (and the unhappiness that goes along with it) very often starts within the family, they quite naturally question the role of family, the basis of capitalism. They are now thinking in terms of communes to explore an alternative way of life.

Because a family of one man and one woman and their children are a consumer unit, GLF is forced to question possessiveness and possessions — another threat to a consumer society.

Because homosexual men do not play out the normal "masculine" role, they are forced to question the results that come of heterosexual male roles and they see, more clearly than most, the shortcomings, the disadvantages, the downright tragedies brought about by social ideals of "masculinity."

They develop, willy nilly, an understanding of how women are oppressed by such males; they have recognized (through their own initial mistreatment of their gay sisters) the same tendencies in themselves; and have become concerned to root them out.

Like all of us, some homosexuals are political and some are not, but their value as a group — the value of all minority groups — lies in the way society forces them, against what may often be their own wishes, to reassess that society's values, the society that will not accept them. We middle-of-the-roaders can judge our wold only by the way it treats outsiders.

And the real outsiders of sexuality, the front lines for us all, are that amorphous group called "transvestites." Opinions still differ as to what, exactly, causes the phenomenon, but it seems likely that the confusion starts in childhood, that a child who is genetically male may be brought up in a way that makes him feel a girl and, in later life, continues to want to dress in women's clothes.

It results in making us, the sexual conformists, face a situation much preached but little practiced: How do you deal with a person rather than the sexual messages he or she gives out?

Women's Liberation, among other movements, makes a lot of noise about being treated as people, not just as women. It is strange and forbidding that the only group, transvestites, where we should be forced to treat people as people — since neither we nor, often, they, fully understand their sexuality — is the group we most radically fail to deal with as people.

So deep is our conformity to sexual roles that an outer confusion throws us into inner confusion — gales of giggles at best, hatred and derision at worst.

Once I was invited to a party where, in one small room, there was nearly every variation of human sexuality, sort of microcosm of the world — heterosexual women in women's clothes, lesbians in women's an din men's clothes, heterosexual men in men's clothes and women's clothe. When the dancing started and people paired off, I sank back on a sofa.

A certain hysteria threatened to take over — as the man said, who is doing what to whom? I used laughter as a defense against a total loss of all the normal reactions I feel with people.

Indeed, until that moment I had never realized just what a battery of sexual signals I had up my sleeve, how vital they were to me.

Like a well-trained Marine, I was desolate and vulnerable once disarmed.

Worse, I found I had no idea, because I had no practice, in treating people as people, in addressing my own inner asexual being to another's asexual being. It appeared that sexual information was essential to me, in spite of my own time spent feeling asexual, thinking asexually.

It is strange to think that in a clearly defined heterosexual world, sexual identity is so clear that most of us never bother to find the person buried beneath the various physical characteristics.

Women's Liberation workshops have, to some extent, explored these sexual signals. Attending my first all-women meeting I felt, in the beginning, curiously deprived. I am used to dealing in a man's world, and several layers of my own signals were suddenly redundant. I was unsure how to put my points, so used am I to presenting myself as a woman to men.

So much less are we all able to present ourselves as "me" to another "me," without the use of sexual signals at all.

Of course our characters are formed, to some extent, by the shape of our bodies, by our sex, by our sexual "beauty" or "ugliness;" but surely our true essence is asexual. Perhaps Christianity's emphasis on the division between body and soul is an attempt — however destructive at times — to point up this fact.

We are a very long way from finding out the truth and if society fails in its increasing efforts to set up other ways of living than the consumer-oriented, family-based structure of today, we may never find out.

But there is nothing like a transvestite in full drag to give us some red-hot clues.