In thinking through the lesbian sex wars of the 1980s, some of the most compelling questions emerge out of the question of the difference between women and men’s sexuality. A variation of nature versus nurture, do women and men really have such different sexualities? On some level, obviously, that could be answered affirmatively just by looking at the remarkable and deeply coercive differences between the socializations of the sexes in our society. And, as Faderman notes, lesbians are not distinct from the parent culture: they too are molded and formed by dominant femininity, as gay men are by dominant masculinity.
Yet, there is something in this argument that weakens when we do begin to think of how lesbians and gay men work to escape this deterministic outlook. After all, if things were so neatly tied up, then lesbian and gay sexuality really wouldn’t be a problem, right? In fact, it is the manner and ways in which lesbians and gay men work to determine their own sexual agendas post-Stonewall that reveals that, while socialized under dominant paradigms of gender, lesbians and gay men remain different, and marked by difference, through their project(s) of same-sex love/sex/attraction/identity.
We talked in class about the influence that cultural lesbian-feminism of the 1970s and 1980s had on the lesbian sex radicals, and the cross-pollination of sex radicalism on mainstream lesbian cultures, including cultural lesbian feminisms that follow the 1970s. For better or worse, things like the L-Word would not exist without the sex radicals, who in tandem with other forces (such as lesbian of color feminisms) broke the essentialist model of womanhood so important to the cultural lesbian feminists of the 1970s: the idea that there is one and true version of womanhood, and that it is superior in nature and quality to masculinity/patriarchy (including, of course, gay male cultures).
The recognition of lesbian diversity is, in some ways, akin to the expulsion from Eden, an end to a dream that had a powerful attraction for many lesbians. This dream of the cultural lesbian feminist was also one that, ironically, was deeply involved in parent culture fascinations with gender and gender differences, albeit from a decidedly different angle. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and thus we are relieved as a society from thinking through gender and gender differences.
Are women more emotive and caring then men, naturally? Are women better caregivers to children? Can women be soldiers in the same way men can? Can women think above their emotions? Are men really emotionally disconnected and afraid of intimacy? What pressures do men of all sexualities feel towards gender performance? These complicated questions are easily sidestepped by a pink and blue discourse that sees penises and vaginas as contrapuntal. We believe deeply, if perhaps incoherently, in gender.
Yet, aside from the obvious differences between vaginas and penises, the corporeal exists both as a physical embodiment (the actual body) and what we make of it (how we read it). For a long time, lesbians and gay men were thought to have gender confusion, identifying wrongly with the opposite gender. As lesbians and gays move more into the metropolitan mainstream, some of those ideas of gender confusion are increasingly put upon transgender people. But the echo of it remains, and is reflected in the various lesbian and gay discourses that both seek to determine new and radical agendas specific to lesbian and gay identity, as well as the tension many lesbians and gay men feel about atypical gender variance or performance in the community: butches, queens, fairies, bull daggers, drag queens, and the like, the markers of visible difference that more conservative centers of LGBT thought consider as freakish as any heterosexual conservative.
In the end, the lesbian sex wars of the 1980s, like the gay sexual hedonism of the 1970s, were exploring uncharted territory, taking something from the parent culture but struggling to define at the same time something new, something different. The challenges of these endeavors should not be underestimated, and nor should the desire, on the part of lesbians and gay men, to think through and critically analyze their relationship to the parent culture, gender norms, and challenging the meanings of being a woman or being a man. We may inherit the pink and blue discourse, but lesbians and gay men have consistently struggled with that discourse, in collaboration and conflict.
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