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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: January 25, 2005 at 1:35 am by Eve Tushnet

2005-01-25T01:35:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

ROMANTIC COMEDIES: So, I said I would reply to Sean Collins. And here it is. If you don’t want my opinion, don’t rattle my cage.

His email reads thus:

Hi Eve!

[Eve said, re Sullivan:] “Andrew Sullivan: ‘And, as I’ve said many times, homosexuality is very easy to understand. It is exactly the same as heterosexuality, with the gender reversed.’ Um, only if men are interchangeable with women. So, no.”

But my wife is not interchangeable with my friend Jesse’s wife, or Paul Newman’s wife, or whoever. Does that mean that my heterosexuality, Jesse’s, and Cool Hand Luke’s are all fundametally different somehow, a la Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-X–Heterosex-Sean, Heterosex-Jesse, Heterosex-Paul?

I dunno, obviously we’re never ever gonna agree on this, but I always thought this aspect of your argument was spectacularly weak and relied on assertions based on a faith that not everyone shares. Men are certainly different from women on several fundamental levels, but in terms of couples, love is love.

So let’s take this bit by bit.

SAME DIFFERENCE. First of all, it might be helpful to point out that you can think two things are different without thinking one is better than the other. For example, I think men are different from women. I don’t think guys are better than chicks, or vice versa. I don’t, as you all probably know, think that homosexual relationships are good, whereas heterosexual relationships can be (although I totally agree with Camassia’s comments here about the ways in which sinful relationships can be infused with love and apparently-okay relationships infused with sin). But I think, actually, that you can agree with everything I’ll say in the rest of this post and still think gay sex is a-okay.

I want to say more than that, really. Actual existing queer people don’t all sign on to this belief that homosexuality is mirror-heterosexuality. It might be worthwhile to listen to people who do think that, even absent Societal Prejudice, a guy who wants guys would not end up identical to a guy who wants girls. It might be worthwhile to listen to people who have actually dated chicks and dudes (hi! *waves*) when we say that it really isn’t the same.

Are the differences cultural constructs? 1) Probably not all of them, yo.

2) If they’re cultural constructs, doesn’t that just push the weight of explanation back one level? Why these cultural constructs and not others?

3) If they are cultural constructs, do we really want to live without them? Do we want an androgynous world, or do we find men and women, ladies and dudes, sexy?

TYPICAL GIRLS… ARE SO CONFUSING: I think a lot of opposition to any talk of sex differences at all is based in the belief that acknowledging sex differences will mean oppressing women. I wrote here about sex differences that don’t rely on some mythos of the “angel in the house.” If that’s why Sean leaned so heavily on individuality in his email, well, let the record show that I agree. I’m sure there are men with whom I have lots of things in common that I don’t share with most women. (The Old Oligarch‘s attentiveness to abstract theory [“world-animal lobster”!], to take the most obviously gender-coded-male example.)

HEY–WANNA TURN THIS INTO AN ART DEBATE? But look, I’m a writer. I write fiction. That’s the biggest reason I can’t accept the philosophy that men and women, or homosexual and heterosexual relationships, are the same.

A friend recently pointed out ways in which Jack Stafford, in “Kissable Pictures,” didn’t talk like a guy. That’s just true. I need to fix it, so that his character will be believable. If I’d defensively responded, “But why can’t a guy act that way?”, I would have lost credibility and would have lost the opportunity to write a different and believable character.

Similarly, I’ve written stories that address both homosexual and heterosexual relationships. I’d be lying if I portrayed them the same way; they’re not the same! “Desire” is the most blatant statement of that, with the confused-but-perhaps-intriguing “Ship Comes In” a close second; but in almost all of my stories, to change the central relationships or orientations would have deeply disrupted the story. I couldn’t write “Judge Me, O God” about a straight girl (or guy, in the sections from Charles’s POV), and I couldn’t write “Why Can’t He Be You?” (current title of the story that used to be “A Separated Soul”) about a lesbian. It’s obvious that one woman won’t necessarily act like the next–compare Suha and Laila, who are sisters!–but it’s equally obvious that women don’t generally act like men, and that sexual relationships will differ based on whether a) both partners are women, b) both partners are men, or c) one is a woman and one is a man. Honestly, I don’t get why this should be hard to acknowledge.

OH BONDAGE! UP YOURS! 1-2-3-4!: I don’t know. I’m not, maybe, in the most accommodating mood to answer these questions, since I spent 2 1/2 hours at the pregnancy center tonight. If you want to have it rubbed in your face that women who sleep with men take different, specific, culturally- but also biologically-imposed risks, why don’t you go do pregnancy tests for women who were on Ortho-Tricyclin, or women who’d had their tubes tied? (I did both tonight.) Women who pretend that sleeping with a man is the same as sleeping with a woman will get hurt. They will get hurt because intercourse still makes babies, despite all our efforts; they’ll get hurt because women aren’t raised the same way men are, despite all our efforts. They’ll get hurt because, from the ice age to the dole age, gender propels us into action, and gender shapes our actions and reactions. The women I’ve known who have been able to take control of their lives have understood that.

THIN LINE BETWEEN LOVE AND CRIME: Finally, is love love?

No.

Seriously. I’m beginning to be fed up with this astonishingly imprecise term, “love,” and this is a perfect example. Is the love of a man for his stepdaughter the same as the love of a woman for her husband? Obviously not. What about the love of a best friend? Is the love of a woman for a man necessarily the same as the love of a woman for another woman? Well, how do we even know? Certainly in terms of risks and rewards faced, they’re not the same. (Pregnancy and dealing with The Weirdness That Is Men vs. societal and familial disapproval, for example. That’s not a universal comparison–some heterosexual couples won’t deal with pregnancy, although virtually all will deal with the possibility/expectation/desire of pregnancy, and not all homosexual couples will deal with comparable degrees of societal or familial disapproval. But I hope the example will at least give a sense of what I mean, that different structures for relationships provoke different reactions in both outsiders and the couple themselves.)

In “The Lion in Winter,” does Henry love Eleanor?

I am perhaps oversensitive here, as I find that gay-marriage proponents tend to denigrate my closest chosen relationships (hi, I’m single) in favor of the Real True And Only Possible Love that is sexual. So yeah, I get a bit snippy (as I think that last sentence did!), and I want to point out that deep abiding love can be as strong or stronger between people who have no romantic relationship as between people who do. I get the impression that our current cultural understanding of “love” is deeply confused, and so I’d rather have it all spelled out (in this case, “Homosexual relationships must be treated equally to heterosexual relationships because a, b, c, which are the relevant factors in [societal honor, governmental preference via marriage, or whatever is really being argued]”) rather than relying on imprecise terms like “love,” which cover all kinds of relationships, and a myriad of sins. Like I said, I’m a writer; but I’m also a tabloid journalist. I want to know the details.

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