Why Men Don’t Iron: The New Reality of Gender Differences

CHAPTER ONE
He’s Not Part One, Part Another
The bisexual fallacy

We hear a lot these days about the ‘new man’. He is more sensitive than the older model, more ready to help about the house or to spend time with his children. He is civilized, de-clawed and gentle. He can still be strong, of course, but his strength is manifested by patience and emotional warmth. This paragon sounds suspiciously like a female; indeed, it is often said that the new man is ‘in touch with his feminine side’. The supposed compliment betrays a fin de millnium unisex ideal. It is RuPaul, supertransvestite, advertising M.A.C.’s Viva Glam lipstick (all profits to an AIDS charity). It is Generation X – with a splash of Calvin Klein’s CKOne – cruising the line between sexual identities and possessing the best traits of both with none of the old male’s inconvenient faults.

Today New Man is updated by another: Postmodern Man, the new man dressed to the hilt in academic theory. He is also a sharing, softer sort of guy, less competitive than the traditional male, and at home with his amorphous sexuality. He too is meant to be in touch with his female side. It might seem, then, that there is a biological component to his makeup. But no, he is entirely moulded by social forces. He is a human object of whom no part is given by nature. Postmodern man is a boy-child of intellectuals who teach gender studies. New man is a creation of popular feminism, media hype and out-of-touch copywriters. What is common to both postmodern man and new man is that they are aspirational figures: neither exists outside the academic mind or Gucci perfume ads. There is one big obstacle to the whole theoretical caboodle: a realistic account of sex differences will close the door on the intellectual postmodern republic.

‘My squeeze, what do you call a guy who irons a blouse?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Anne. ‘I’ve never met one. But this sounds like a bar-room joke, a hostage to fortune if ever I –’

‘He’s a postmodern man.’

‘Eyes glaze at the word.’

‘Maana man, then,’ says Bill. ‘Like tomorrow, he never comes.’

‘But how can he be postmodern? Post-all-that’s-present. Post today? Post now?’

‘Post the present era. Us male humans are to be transformed. We’re all to be part one and part another: the world of both. It’s a world in which the dividing lines of opposition – oppression or competition – are no more. It’s a land of blur, of ambiguity. Little wonder the eyes cloud over.’

‘I get it,’ says Anne. ‘Postmodern means post men.’

Some cynics may doubt whether this gender-bending new postmodern man truly exists outside advertisements, women’s magazines and a few urban enclaves, but the ideal persists. It is based on the assumption of bisexuality: that within each of us lies both a male and a female nature, and that the male can be tamed by getting in touch with his feminine side. A man who succeeds in doing so will be less threatening, especially to women and gays, and it is hardly surprising that most of the strident headline pressure for men to cast off their old macho image and become sensitive, caring, new-model males stems from the women’s and homosexuals’ lobbies. Women and gays, after all, have most to fear from the old, unreconstructed male who can be intolerant, crude and show a frightening capacity for violence; the new man, if he can be fetched into existence, will be a much pleasanter creature. We have turned Professor Higgins’s question on its head. Now we ask why a man can’t be more like a woman?

The straight answer would be that it is not in most men’s nature to be like a woman, nor in hers to be like him. That assertion, however, ignores another fashionable belief which insists that our sexuality is not natural at all, but a social construct. This belief, which goes hand in hand with claims about bisexuality, insists that we all have the capacity to be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, and the only thing which determines our sexual orientation is social pressure. At first glance this might seem an odd assertion, but increasingly the western world is being driven by the belief, often enshrined in law, that the only differences between men and women, other than their obvious physical attributes, are those caused by privilege, opportunity and influence.

Social reformers, with their aim of eliminating oppression, now think they have found a way to eliminate male aggression. The male is to be socially transformed. He is to be turned into a non-hostile, uncompetitive type. There is an obstacle: any realistic account of gender differences which denies the male competitive world denies the nature of men. Does that bother the social reformers? Not at all. What cannot be changed can be swept under the carpet. It is to this end that the male is found by the liberal arts academics to be a social, cultural construct – open to deep transformation. Only sexual orientation does not wash away in the communal bath; human nature is not biodissolvable.

‘Nothing is transmitted but the social?’ asks Anne.

‘It’s in the vested interest of the social sciences to find all things socially transmitted,’ Bill answers.

‘You mean,’ Anne asks, ‘that if we transform man’s social world then we transform him?’

‘Those who believe in the perfectibility of man do not want to know about the masculine as natural.’

‘There’s evidence to support the social hypothesis…’

‘… but only if you don’t look beyond the external.’

Scholars are no longer allowed to imply that heterosexuality is the norm for sexual attraction. In the standard US handbook for avoiding bias in language (Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses, 1995) we are not to talk of husband, wife, spouse or marriage. We are asked to substitute gender neutral terms like domestic companion, longtime partner or primary relationship. Language is freighted with splendid deceits, and to impose rules of thumb as to what can (cannot) be said is to put one’s finger on the point of a tack. To the average male the language of the thought police is disparaging, offensive and prejudicial. There is fear and loathing in the new sexism: it is both anti-sex and anti-male.

The male is pre-judged – as prejudiced. Here is the belief that all should conform to the bisexual ideal: a social idyll in which sexual differences are eliminated. He is wrong-footed at the starting line. He is accused of homophobia. But what of heterophobia? What if it is not the average male who is prejudiced but all those who assume that straight is potentially bent – unisexual, bisexual, part-one-part-another, desexed, androgynous, queer, both/and, homosexual, crossing over, in between.

‘The word police will get you.’

‘The charge?’ asks Anne.

‘Heterosexism.’

‘Because we say that the heterosexual male is normal? Or the norm?’

‘To be born Chinese is the norm in China.’

‘A gay might stand out as abnormal.’

‘My green eyes might stand out in Mongolia,’ says Bill. ‘Would that be queer? You know I’m no more likely to change my sexual orientation than the colour of my eyes.’

‘Lots of people think everyone’s a bit unisex.’

‘Like being a bit pregnant?

“‘DELETE, DELETE, DELETE,” say the word police. We are all potentially bisexual.’

‘One in a hundred, more like,’ says Anne. ‘Those who include speak only for themselves.’

If women, the argument goes, are given the same opportunities as men, and are not restrained by the dead hand of ‘old boy networks’, then they can achieve all that a man can achieve. It is hard to argue against that well-meaning assertion, even though a dangerous and unscientific assumption lies behind it: that men and women are the same.

Perhaps the most extreme and obvious example of this assumption is seen in America where, in the last few years, lawyers have forced the hitherto male-dominated military to open all its doors to women. The result has been legal equality and constant trouble. The men are consistently accused of insensitivity or, worse, of sexual harassment – and it does not take much for a serviceman to be accused of that most heinous crime. Indeed, according to guidelines laid down by the Pentagon, if a soldier merely looks at one of his female colleagues for more than three seconds then he is harassing her. The US Navy even closed itself down for a whole day so that its men could be lectured on the evils of sexual harassment. The whole experiment, which rushes on with the inevitability of the Gadarene swine nearing the precipice, can be simply summarized: women demand equal opportunity, gain it, then complain that the men behave badly. ‘Sensitivity training’, or even disciplinary action, then follows to change the men’s behaviour to make them gentler; in fact, to make them more like women. It would be easier, surely, to recruit only women?

The homosexual lobby is as eager as some women to blur gender identities. It is axiomatic among many gay lobbyists that everyone’s sexuality is a mix of male and female, and that where any one person ends up on the sliding scale depends solely on social pressures and influences. Homosexuality, they tell us, is a convenient social label, no more ‘real’ than heterosexuality. Ten years ago a conference devoted its entire agenda to just that assertion. One of the conference’s published conclusions was that ‘homosexuality is not inherent in an individual but constructed’.¹ No wonder such people believe that a little social pressure will shift all the old, crude, uncomfortably macho males along the continuum to a place where they will be subtly feminized and so become less threatening. Violence against women and gays would drop dramatically, and no one will deny that this would be a desirable outcome. Men’s violence against women is well documented; perhaps less well known is the growing intolerance shown by heterosexual males for gays, an intolerance that has certainly led to a dramatic increase in assaults on homosexuals by ‘straight’ men.²

The growing incidence of anti-gay violence is even adduced as further evidence for our bisexuality. A Dutch study of anti-gay violence noted that the victims were usually ‘the least manly’ in appearance.³ Without citing evidence (no questions were directed to the attackers) the study solemnly reported that ‘it was presumed that [the attackers] victimised this group of men … because they themselves were homosexual and could stamp out the fire within them by the use of violence against “obvious gays”.’ So straight men attack gays because they are really gay themselves? Freud and his followers have much to answer for in this tortuous reasoning. Not one to cling to a single fallacy when he could hold two, Freud asserted that men were partly women (they have nipples, don’t they?) and that they repressed their ‘natural bisexuality’. That notion has given intellectual respectability to the claim that we all have the ever-present possibility of being gay or straight.

To be anti-gay is thus explained as a reaction to the male’s fear of his own latent homosexuality, an explanation that is supported by the word used to describe such prejudice, homophobia, which means ‘fear of sameness’. ‘People are homophobic because they fear their own latent homosexuality, or because they are insecure in their own masculinity. This answer represents one of the most popular “common sense” explanations for homophobia. It is a theory that guides our practice.’⁴ Homophobia, another learned journal says, ‘reflects three assumptions; that anti-gay prejudice is primarily a fear response; that it is irrational and dysfunctional for individuals that manifest it; that it is primarily an “individual aberration” rather than a reflection of cultural values.’⁵ This is now received wisdom. In every straight man there is a gay screaming to be let out.

‘The heterosexual norm is taken as Enemy Number One,’ says Anne.

‘Mere heterophobia,’ says Bill.

Collins’ dictionary defines homophobia as: ‘intense hatred or fear of homosexuals or homosexuality’. Thus to use the word ‘homophobia’ is to imply that the aversion that most straight males feel towards gays is a psychological disorder. The word is a description of the extreme – ‘intense fear’ and ‘hatred’ – and to employ it as a description of the average male’s reaction to homosexuality is absurd. His feelings are not of hatred, but of aversion. The aversion might include an element of disgust, but never of fear. Nor is it a psychological disorder, rather it is the normal straight male’s instinctive revulsion from the idea of same-sex relations. That reaction is innate, natural, so prejudice it is not.

You will note that this ‘latent homosexual’ explanation is described as common sense, not as a scientific finding – hardly surprising, for there has been too little research into the aversion that most men feel for homosexuality. But what research does exist suggests that straight men do not fear gays, nor do they fear the possibility of gayness within themselves. ‘Common sense’, indeed, suggests the very opposite: gays, as a group, are not perceived as threatening, and since most men are oblivious of any homosexual urges within themselves, why should they fear such urges? Fear, or phobia, does not seem to play any part in the average man’s dislike of gays. The bisexual explanation of homophobia might be ‘common sense’ to the gay lobby, but it also might be plain wrong.

Heterosexuality is the norm for sexual attraction. This is not to assume or imply that homosexuality is deviant. It too is natural. Although most Americans still believe that our sexual orientation is a matter of choice,⁶ it is not. But that is a society in which you are meant to be free to become what you want – not least when that want implies a moral choice. And where there’s a choice, one should choose to be upright: straight. There is a confusion here. Gayness is no more a matter of choice than being born American or Mexican, black or white.

A new explanation is required for the average man’s anti-gay attitude. And the word ‘average’ is used deliberately, for research reveals that a majority of heterosexuals do have negative attitudes towards homosexuals. Those attitudes range from mild distaste to the extremes described in the dictionary definition, but their widespread existence suggests that ‘homophobia’, far from being an ‘individual aberration’, is in fact a reflection of something more than cultural and biological values. But what values?

One study correlated the masculinity profiles of male college students with their attitudes towards homosexuals and discovered, unsurprisingly, that the most masculine students were the most anti-gay. This might suggest that those who argue that ‘macho’ men fear their feminine side are right, but the survey did not uncover that fear. Instead the ‘homophobic’ subjects complained of gay harassment. Gays were ‘getting too close’ or ‘brushing against my body’. Another complained he was being ‘checked out’. Such homosexual behaviour made 42% of heterosexuals move away.⁷ A common heterosexual aversion to overt homosexuality is captured in these studies, but never commented on. Instead the ‘common-sense’ explanation is advanced; that the most masculine heterosexuals are really gays in flight-denial.

Another study reports that 47% of men have a purely negative reaction to gays. ‘I don’t like them’; ‘I want nothing to do with them’; ‘I hope Aids wipes them out’.⁸ At least 47% is a minority, but the same study discovered that a further 45% of men were mildly anti-gay; their attitude was summed up as, ‘[Gays] generally don’t bother me so long as they don’t try and press their beliefs on me.’ So if this study is right, then an astonishing 92% of heterosexual males will experience anti-gay feelings if homosexuality is overtly pressed on them. Again, this hardly suggests an ‘individual aberration’: it begins to look more and more like a common feeling. And once again ‘fear’ does not come into it. These heterosexual males show no fear of homosexuals, but merely feel distaste or revulsion at a homosexual approach.

And it is not men alone who experience this aversion. Alan Wolfe, a professor at Boston University, interviewed two hundred suburban Americans for a book on the state of American society and discovered that his slice of middle America was happily unprejudiced, open-minded and tolerant. ‘Yet,’ he reported, ‘there is one exception to America’s persistent and ubiquitous nonjudgmentalism. However much they are willing to accept almost anything, most of the middle class Americans I spoke to were not prepared to accept homosexuality.’⁹ Wolfe’s interviewees used words like ‘abnormal’, ‘immoral’, ‘sinful’, ‘unacceptable’, ‘sick’ or ‘unhealthy’ to describe the gay lifestyle, and other American studies show a similar widespread aversion. One such study reported that no less than 66% of American adults, male and female, condemned ‘homosexual behaviour as morally wrong or as a sin’.¹⁰ A similar result was yielded by another American study which reported that 60% of adults (male and female) thought that homosexuality in and of itself was no great problem, but it was still ‘obscene and vulgar’.¹¹ The same survey suggested that these negative attitudes to homosexuality were associated with ‘sexual conservatism, anti-feminist attitudes, and with strong beliefs in male sex-appropriate behaviour’. For the gay or feminist lobbies this is a litany of horrors, but try putting it another way: so-called ‘homophobia’ is associated with men and women who lead decent lives, respect sexual fidelity and consider the male–female relationship to be natural. These same socially conservative people supported the right of homosexuals to attend church (80%) and their right to consensual sex in private (70%).

The broad conclusion to be drawn from these studies is that something under half of all straight men harbour strong anti-gay attitudes, and that about the same proportion possess a milder antipathy. Women share these attitudes, but perhaps the important thing to remark on is that the majority, despite their reservations about the morality of homosexual behaviour, are on the side of toleration: if the gays leave us alone, they seem to be saying, we will leave them alone. And yet the average person is condemned for feeling a dislike of homosexuality. Homophobia, the extreme manifestation of the aversion, is obviously reprehensible, but instead of trying to understand it the gay lobby attempts to eradicate it with the message that homophobia is mere denial. Once we all recognize our bisexuality, the argument claims, we will lose our irrational and sometimes violent prejudices, but the research suggests a much simpler reason for the straight’s aversion to the gay, and a reason which really is rooted in common sense.

The attraction of gay to gay, or of lesbian to lesbian, is natural. The gay or lesbian is attracted to members of the same sex. The gay does not want sex with women, nor does the lesbian want sex with men. There is a corollary. A heterosexual male is attracted to a heterosexual female. He does not want sex with men. That too is normal.

It is a consequence that gays (or lesbians) may cruise on a crash course. Gays are naturally attracted to those of the same sex, which means they are attracted to men in general. A problem arises in that the majority of men are not sexually attracted to gays nor, indeed, to any other men. Again, that is natural. What to the normal gay is natural and desirable is to most men unnatural and they recoil from it. No one accuses a woman of a ‘phobia’ if she repels an unwanted sexual advance, yet men are apparently phobic if they dislike being ‘checked out’ by a gay. The intolerance of straights is not of gays as such, but rather of the assumption by gays that others are like, or have the capacity to be like, themselves. The conventional male can be unsettled by those who are not plainly heterosexual. The thought of a homosexual act is unenjoyable to him in the obvious sense that it is not what he enjoys. Nor does he feel mere indifference towards it: it troubles him. The gay man desires what he finds undesirable and so the gay advance is unwelcome. It is a foray across conventional boundaries, an invasion of the Eros and private space that is part of the self, and it is seen as gay harassment. Any gay reviewing the results of the studies might decide that the best way to reduce society’s antipathy towards homosexuality is for the gay to be more aware of the heterosexual’s need for a private space; in other words, to practice more restraint.

‘What I don’t understand,’ Anne asks, ‘is why you men are so rude about gays, calling them bloody shirt-lifters, fairies, queers.’

‘We can call them much worse than that,’ Bill says.

‘But why? They aren’t a threat to you. They’re not competing.’

‘Perhaps it’s because what they desire of us,’ Bill says, ‘is abhorrent to us. I can’t stand the idea of having sex with another man.’

‘You fear it?’

‘What’s to fear? I might as well be frightened of becoming a vegetarian.’

‘No chance of that!’

‘I suspect most men shun gays,’ Bill says, ‘and maybe even despise them, because they don’t compete in the great male race.’

‘In which women are the prizes?’

‘Thank God, yes.’

‘But why be repelled by homosexuals? Surely what they do with each other is their own business, and they have the right to privacy.’

‘Privacy, yes, but I don’t want them anywhere near my private space. My private space is you and I, and I don’t want a third person in there telling me that with a little gender-bending I could enjoy lifting his shirt.’

‘Bill!’

‘Do what they want – unto themselves – but to camp on my ground is to test the limits of tolerance.’

To tolerate something is to put up with what you do not like and gays, of course, want more than toleration: they want acceptance, and believe that the rest of us must give that acceptance. They think we will do so more easily once we recognize that we are all gay – or at least, that all of us are bisexual and so have the capacity for gayness within us. But are we bisexual? Freud certainly believed as much, but it was Alfred Kinsey’s studies in the 1940s and 1950s that seemed to set the seal of academic approval on the bisexual theory. When Kinsey’s famous study was first published it caused shock, for he claimed that 37% of all males had experienced (or were experiencing) homosexual relationships, and that a further 13% had homosexual urges even though they did nothing to satisfy those desires.¹² Here was startling proof that fully 50% of males were actively or potentially gay, and Kinsey did not conclude that the other 50% were free of homosexual urges. He postulated a scale of male sexuality which ranged from wholly heterosexual to exclusively gay, and he concluded:

Males do not represent two distinct populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum of each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this regarding human sexual behaviour the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.¹³

Kinsey’s influence was tremendous. His survey was the first to offer an estimate of gayness as a proportion of the population and his estimate shocked, but so it should for Kinsey used a very odd group of people to arrive at his figures. Instead of finding a representative sample from the general population, he essentially used a self-selected sample. Not only that, but his concerns about his own sexuality – although married he was probably homosexual – biased his choice of subject.¹⁴ No modern academic would recognize Kinsey’s survey as reliable, yet its influence persists, mainly because his results reinforce the fashionable bisexual theory. So Kinsey keeps his place in the pantheon despite the fact that study after study has demonstrated how utterly wrong his results were.¹⁵ Later research, as we shall see, demonstrates again and again that the incidence of homosexuality is much lower than Kinsey stated.

The gay lobby ignores the new research, preferring to claim that homosexuality is widespread. There is, after all, strength in numbers, so the more gays, the more clout the gay lobby wields. The usual figure quoted in the newspapers is that 10% of all men are exclusively homosexual and up to 33% have experienced some homosexual activity. The gay lobby publicizes these figures despite the fact that survey after survey has shown them to be wild exaggerations. The truth appears to be that between 1% and 4% of men are homosexual, and even fewer women are lesbians. An examination of the many post-Kinsey studies concludes that ‘it is unreasonable to consider the often-used figure of 10% of the male population as more or less regularly engaging in same-sex activities. The figure is closer to half that. And the figure for the lesbian population is even smaller. Further, routinely exclusive or predominantly exclusive homosexual activities are more common than bisexual activities.’¹⁶ Milton Diamond, the author of the survey, goes on to say that 10% is a political figure. In fact not one post-Kinsey survey has ever yielded an estimate as high as that. An NOP poll in America in 1989 suggested that homosexuals were 3.3% of the male population. A 1988 survey by America’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) yielded a figure of 2.4%.¹⁷ A survey conducted for the USA’s Centers for Disease Control in 1989 suggested that the total number of men who had ever experienced male to male sexual conduct, as either exclusively or occasional homosexuals, was 7.3%.¹⁸ A survey of several polls, published in 1991, derived a figure of 5–7% for men who had had homosexual experience,¹⁹ while Milton Diamond’s own study in Hawaii suggests that only 3% of males ever engage in same-sex activity. Another extensive review concluded that exclusive homosexuality was practised by no more than 5%.²⁰ Even a telephone survey conducted in San Francisco, surely the gay capital of the world, did not reach the oft-quoted figure of 33% of males as exclusively homosexual. Only 10% of respondents admitted to some homosexual experiences.²¹

The most comprehensive study to date surveyed 34,000 high school students in America and reported that, by the age of 18, 99.2% of males were exclusively heterosexual.²² Just 2.8% of the 18-year-olds had experienced homosexual acts, but less than 1% were exclusively gay. That low figure is reinforced by the findings of the National Survey of Men, considered to be the most representative study of American males, which suggested that only 1.1% of all men were exclusively homosexual and only 2.3% (which includes the previous 1.1%) had ever experienced homosexuality.²³

So survey after survey suggests that the real figure of exclusively homosexual men is in the region of 1–4%. The percentage of bisexuals is so small as to count in that range. Which means that 96–99% of men are heterosexual, and almost certainly exclusively heterosexual, for the surveys also indicate that sexual preferences are overwhelmingly one way or the other. Very few men are bisexual. The vast majority of men are either gay or straight, and most men are straight.²⁴ It is time to forget Kinsey’s extraordinary figures and time to abandon the much touted 10%.

The gay lobby’s response to that low figure is either to quote old surveys that used unreliable samples, or else to allege that the more recent results are misleading because most men are unwilling to admit to homosexual experience. ‘Homophobia’, in other words, makes men lie to researchers and thus all the surveys are flawed because people won’t be honest about their sex lives. So it is reassuring to hear about the work of Kurt Freud who investigated male sexual orientation with a machine which measured the smallest changes of penile engorgement. Erections, as any man will testify, are hard to fake and if a man has no homosexual feelings then lubricious pictures of naked boys will leave him limp, just as the most luscious centrefold will fail to arouse a gay man. Kurt Freud’s findings demonstrated almost beyond doubt that the vast majority of men were either exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual. There is no sliding scale, no continuum, no latent gayness and no universal bisexuality. There is no scary gay in the straight man’s closet.²⁵

The unisex ideal, which melds our male and female components, is beginning to look a little out of reach, yet some people still refuse to abandon the notion of bisexuality for they believe it is the route to universal toleration. Perversely, the argument that men with anti-gay attitudes are themselves gays in denial exacerbates the very thing it sets out to defeat. ‘Common sense’ suggests that most men and women are comfortable within their sexual orientation, and to suggest otherwise will irritate them. The non-gay male is being told that he is partly female, thus calling into question his masculinity, and if this annoys him he is accused of protesting too much. Thus he is twice impugned. He is annoyed – and small wonder. The attempt to dissolve stereotypes by imposing a unisex world can only reinforce prejudice. The explanation that we are all bisexual promotes the very reaction it means to abate.

But suppose there were another way to counter the average heterosexual’s aversion to homosexuality? First we need to understand what is meant by ‘homophobia’, and it is our contention that it has nothing to do with fear. Gays, as a group, are not fearsome – indeed their popular reputation is the very opposite – and because the vast majority of men experience no secret homosexual longings it seems perverse to insist that they live in constant dread of such desires. Instead the prejudice against gays appears to spring from a vague feeling that homosexual behaviour is ‘unnatural’, and not so very long ago that was also the opinion of orthodox medicine. No wonder many ordinary folk persist in thinking of gayness as a deviant condition, a perversion, something immoral, even a sin.