Lesbian for a Year - some questions.

I've been thinking about Lesbian For A Year by Brooke Hemphill, a memoir of a straight woman who, frustrated by the single life, decided to forego men and date women for a year. I haven’t read the whole thing; this article by the author describes the basis for the book and how "Ultimately, dating women made me a better straight person."

All I seem to have here is questions:

What if a lesbian got fed up of women (it happens) and decided to date men for a year?  Would this be a marketable memoir? What would the backlash look like? Would we expect straight men to be more or less insulted to find themselves portrayed as romantic and sexual guinea pigs?

Many gay men and lesbians have spent a year or ten pretending to be straight; dating people of other genders, occasionally even marrying them. Is anyone interested in gay perspectives on the straight life and if not, why not? 

Could a woman hope to become “a better lesbian” by dating a few men? Can we only become better people by occupying marginalised spaces? If so, what hope for self-improvement among marginalised people?

Why is it that the word bisexual seems entirely unavailable to some people who experience romantic and sexual attraction or relationships with both men and women*?  Folks should be free to use whatever labels they like, but outside of single-sex environments, is it common for straight women to enjoy sex  or having romantic relationships with women? What makes a straight person straight?  

Imagine that a straight guy wrote a book, “Gay man for a year.”  He was fed up with women, finding them too demanding or fussy or whatever the stereotype may be. Then one morning after a night on the town, he wakes up in bed with a man, and decides to give gayness a go. Observing the behaviour of other men in romantic relationships, he realises something about himself before returning to the pursuit of lady-love.

Yeah, imagine that.

Why am I so certain that such a book would never happen? Why do I suspect that if a man conducted such an experiment, he might be anxious to keep it a secret from his friends, and from any future girlfriends?

Sexuality is weird and wonderful. The way our culture frames sexuality is plain weird.

C N Lester has some suggestions for alternative books they would rather read. 


* I assume most bisexual people are attracted to members of various genders of which men and women are but two, but in this case, it's about men and women.

On Feeling, Acting or Being A Creep

Having tweeted a link to this excellent post from Dr Nerdlove: Socially Awkward isn't an Excuse, I entered into a silly circular argument with a friend. My friend expressed confusion and frustration; despite her best efforts, she was always perceived as creepy whenever she had told anyone that she found them attractive. Nobody had explicitly told her she was creepy, so quite foolishly, I entered into an argument about whether this inference was a reasonable one. I should know by now that forcing someone  to argue for their own deficiency doesn't lift anyone's mood.

But the subsequent discussion made me think about the difference between feeling, acting or being a creep.

Feeling like a Creep

There should be a term which is the opposite - the unhealthy polar opposite - to sexual entitlement. Feeling like a creep is close; regarding oneself as physically and mentally disgusting, considering one's existence as a sexual being, an imposition on the rest of the world.

Radiohead's Creep was my theme song from its release in 1993, when I was twelve years old, throughout the following decade or so. I felt that I was a creep, I was a weirdo. WTF was I doing there? I didn't belong there.

There are lots of us who approach sexual maturity in the belief that there's something wrong with our sexuality. Not necessarily wrong as in sinful - although that's often in the mix - but wrong as in damaged or damaging. Words frequently associated with homosexual desire in the media and my household included pervert and predatory. It was more or less against the law for a teacher to discuss the subject of my particular sexuality throughout my high school career.

At school I knew, for sure, how any female object of my desire or affection would feel if she knew, because we did have one out lesbian in our year group; a very tall, dramatic young women whose name wasn't Petronella Conquest but it was pretty close. The worry was, what if she fancied you? After all, girl's a lesbian, she could fancy any of us. And then what? How disgusting would that be? Not that I ever heard any rumour of this girl even flirting with anyone. The fact of her attraction - the fact of her potential attraction - was enough for cries of disgust and outrage to fill the form room. And Petronella was slimmer, more confident, more sophisticated than I and didn't have spots.

So even though I kept everything firmly under wraps, I felt like a creep, like many closeted queer kids in high school; I felt that my desire was predatory, deceptive, a betrayal of my friendships.

And before I got the chance to leave school, set out into the world and find my people, I got sick and grew to like my body an awful lot less. Believing my body to be disgusting made this ten times worse, as if I had no right to sexual pleasure, even in fantasy. In this context, I got together with my first husband, who made me feel better by tolerating me as I was (agreeing that my body was, in fact, quite gruesome), then treating me with the disgust and contempt that I thought I deserved. Until I didn't.

I don't know if straight women are often made to feel creepy - I've not really heard anyone describe that. Unwanted, unloveable or ridiculous, undoubtedly, but I don't know if straight women ever think that their attraction could, if revealed, make someone's skin crawl.  This is how I felt, and how I continued to feel - on and off - for most of my twenties, whether it was about the women or the men I was attracted to; they were all much more beautiful in body, mind and soul than I was. I was the haggard lumpen troll in the shadows, looking on with lecherous eyes.

Nobody should feel that way. It is never true, whoever you are, whatever you look like, whoever you fancy. Even if you fancy someone genuinely inappropriate - it's what you do (or please, don't do) about it that counts.


Acting or Coming Across Like a Creep.

People can come across like a creep inadvertently for three reasons; the things they say and do, the past experiences of the person they're approaching and prejudice.

Everyone - not just the socially awkard - can fluff up in small and big ways that sometimes leads to upset and awkwardness, especially when it comes to flirtation, or conversations that might be read that way. Add alcohol into the mix and things can go very wrong.

My own gaffs have never been terribly dramatic, just being needy and over-keen at times when I've been desperately lonely. But I do remember one due to abject exhaustion: When saying goodnight to a new friend at the end of an evening, I kissed her on each cheek, as the French do. No idea what possessed me -I hadn't done this since the two weeks I spent in France as a child. Then I hugged her, just for good measure. It wasn't an excuse for physical contact - it was as if the contents of my brain had been largely emptied out such that I no longer knew how people of my own culture say goodbye to one another.

However, the effects of social mistakes are usually very short-lived. They can occasionally damage relationships, but this is because of awkwardness, embarrassment, confusion and annoyance - not because someone feels threatened or intimidated in any prolonged way. If you realise you've made a mistake, you apologise (if that doesn't compound things) and try to put it right. There's no argument about what happened. Nobody's left looking over their shoulder all the way home that night.

Things get a little bit worse when others have past experiences of harassment and sexual aggression. Sometimes, an act can seem creepy because it bears some similarity to other acts of sexual aggression. For example, if a woman routinely experiences sexual harassment at the bus stop, then she may prefer that nobody ever speaks to her at the bus stop, because however friendly it may seem at first, she's seen it blow up in her face before. All men run the risk of seeming creepy talking to women they don't know well. I'd still say it's worth trying to talk to one another (well I think so, but I have never lived in a city).

However, sometimes we seem creepy just because of who we are.  Sometimes, this is about the big prejudices: homophobia, disablism, classism and racism can all make people perceive others as creepy. In movies, I have seen German, Eastern European and Russian accents, stereotypically Arab features, effeminacy in men and butchness in women, plus impairment - especially albinism, facial scars, withered hands, limps and so forth - all used to signpost that a character is sinister. Also, men who are very thin, very fat or very short are often seen this way, as if non-standard bodies render any sexual feelings they have something depraved or predatory (in fat, old and short women, sexual desire is rendered comical rather than threatening).

The little course in cognitive poetics we're doing has talked about the personification of Uriah Heap - the literary archetype of creep - but when you reread the text, the greatest part of his initial creepiness is the fact he is very pale, thin, ugly and fidgetty. He is a kiss-ass who behaves very badly, but that comes much later; at first, we hate him mostly for what he looks like.

Some adult straight men are nervous of gay men, for the same reason my classmates were nervous of Petronella. Disabled people are perhaps especially vulnerable to this because we are often seen as sexless - to assert our sexuality, even in the most gently flirtatious remark, might make us appear to be something other than what we seemed - like the cherub-faced child in the horror movie that suddenly says something knowing about tracker mortgages.

Then there are the lesser prejudices. I grew up with the idea that men in long grey raincoats are creepy, even though I've never encountered a creepy man in a long grey raincoat. Some people find goths creepy, as well as punks and geeks, horror buffs, taxidermists, antique dealers, folk who love reptiles and spiders, butchers, abattoir workers, criminologists, Daleks, undertakers, Bronies or adult Beliebers (okay, so maybe they are).

The trouble is, with all of the above, we can't ever be sure why someone else might think us creepy. We can rarely be sure that they even do. We just have to watch our behaviour, because that's the one thing we're responsible for and the one thing we can change if we mess up.

However, because we're all decent people, we accept rejection. Romantic or social rejection, whether grounded in high ideals, the lowest form of bigotry or pure whim, is not something that can be argued with. Real creeps don't get that. We do.


On Being A Creep.

Being a creep is about entitlement. It's not always entitlement to sex; it is sometimes about romantic attention or social power, but there's often a sexual element. Entitlement doesn't necessarily coincide with social confidence, but creepiness (meant here to mean that underhand, passive aggressive strain of sexual aggression) often coincides with a sort of arrogance of the underdog. Doctor Nerdlove focuses on this as an issue within geek culture, but Eleanor Brown tweeted this newspaper cutting, which demonstrates the same kind of thing elsewhere:

It reads: Rush-Hour Crush. Love (well, lust) is all around us, as is proven by the messages left by our commuter cupids.

Cappuchino One Sugar. If you're the girl I think you are, I'm often in the queue behind you at Letchworth Garden City station's coffee shop. I've tried flirting but you're too busy trying to get the attention of the guy behind the counter. I'm training to be a barrister, you're ignoring me for a barista. Please turn around so we can discuss my briefs.

Shiny Shoes, English Breakfast Tea.

This chap is a creep. He is addressing a young woman who, despite his efforts, demonstrates zero interest in him. In Shiny Shoes' universe, this is not right or fair. The girl is wrong. What she needs is:

• To be told that she is making a ridiculous mistake.
• To be shown he is deserving of her attention, because of the job he does/ is training for.
• To be encouraged with a very sexual joke. The law is a rich ground for puns. He could have said, "Turn around and judge for yourself." or "Let's discuss this case." or even "You've got a lovely a posteriori." which at least keeps things to a level of outer clothing and appearance. 

Notice the lack of compliments. The guy doesn't even offer to buy her a coffee. 

Now this ad is unlikely to have deeply upset the young woman. In my mind, the woman and the barista both read it, their shared mortification brings them together and this cutting will eventually be pasted in the back of their wedding album, so they can tell the story to their kids.

However, some people act this way in the same room, when you are alone with them or in private conversation on-line, and sometimes while making physical contact with you. The message is always the same; 

My sexual, romantic or social desires are right. I am deserving of love, sexual gratification, friendship and status. People should pay attention to me. People should want to be with me, on my terms. People should laugh at my jokes and be flattered by my attentions.  

Your feelings are misguided or you're fooling yourself about how you really feel. The boundaries you've established - by drawing a line, rejecting me, or ignoring me in the coffee shop queue - are flexible. Your verbal and non-verbal communication is open to any interpretation I like. If you react badly, it is because there's something wrong with you, you stupid bitch.

Some people have argued that the use of the word creep might be regarded as the male equivalent of slut, and that calling a man a creep is shaming him for his sexuality. This is not the case at all. The big difference is that the word slut, even in its more pejorative sense, does not describe someone who is imposing her sexuality on others. She might be a corrupting influence (according to the spirit of this slur), but she doesn't coerce.

Meanwhile, women can be creepy. Women can force lingering physical contact on people who didn't ask for it - I've seen women plant themselves on men's laps without introduction, I've had women touch me far more than I'd like. Women can react very badly to rejection, become angry or simply ignore what is being said to them. Women can believe that they are magically worthy and deserving of sexual attention, love or social power. And I don't think women are any less capable than men of arguing that the people who reject them are at fault; they're shallow, prejudiced, lying about their sexuality, or are capable of handling a real woman.

Yet out in a world where men tend to have greater social capital, are more physically threatening and are often sold narratives where all good men, including the underdogs, are rewarded with female attention, the worst of this behaviour is most often committed by men.

Thanks to Lisa, Mary & The Morningstar for the discussion about this.

What it means to be Cisgender.

Obviously, everything to do with human identity is socially constructed. When we use labels to identify ourselves, we're sometimes talking about things we feel very deeply, sometimes about things we see purely politically and sometimes, it's really more about the way other people see us.

So for example, my sexuality is integral to who I am, far more than my gender: I cannot conceive a version of myself with a different sexuality, whereas in almost all dreams where I am not myself, I am a man. Being disabled is very important to many experiences I have had and I strongly identify with other disabled people fighting discrimination, but I am perceived as and therefore feel more or less disabled in different contexts - it is even conceivable, though very unlikely, that one day I won't be disabled any more. Being white is something I am aware of in many different contexts - probably mostly in terms of consuming fiction, where this one aspect of my identity is treated as not only normal but best (stories have to be about white people!).

Being a cis woman is not an integral part of my identity - I rarely think about being cis at all - but it is a privilege I have and am aware of. Meanwhile, Glosswitch has been wrestling with what it means to be cis:

"To break the stranglehold gender stereotypes have over human experience – distorting and restricting our experience of ourselves – should not involve telling whole swathes of humankind that they “match” their gender. [...] Matching cis maleness – the identity most closely associated with “being human” – must feel like winning the gender lottery. It’s not the same if you inhabit a female body. Who’d want the values associated with that? Yet that is what cis women are told they are stuck with."

This isn't how I see it at all.

Being cis gender means I am not transgender. It certainly doesn't mean that I, as a woman, am everything that a woman is supposed to be within my culture - or even any of those things. It doesn't say very much about the clothes I wear, the way I think, my hobbies and interests or my sexuality. This doesn't even attempt to say anything about my genes, genitals or reproductive potential (Most cis women, most of the time, cannot get pregnant. A significant minority of cis women can never get pregnant.)

All my being cis means is that (a) the word woman is the best way I have of describing my gender and (b) this coincides with the way that other people always have described me. Thus cis, on the side of, as opposed to trans, across. This doesn't mean that a trans person and I can't have a very great deal in common - including shared experiences of gender non-conformity and sexuality, psychological dysmorphia issues as well as some crossover between trans and disabled experiences, especially while transgender remains heavily pathologised. But I am not trans and perhaps crucially, I have never received the negative treatment a trans person receives.

It is quite ludicrous to imagine that human beings might be divided between those people who feel comfortable in their assigned gender - along with all the accompanying cultural baggage - and those who belong to another gender altogether (presumably, embracing the accompanying cultural baggage of their true gender). There's perhaps genderqueer in between, and here, the definitions are looser - many cis folk might well identify as genderqueer given greater personal freedom and knowledge of this possibility. However, this still doesn't mean that everyone - or anyone - left in the cis category would match their assigned gender. Gender is a social construct. Human beings use social constructs and are very heavily influenced by social constructs, but we also strain against them, constantly, because they don't bloody fit.

There are obvious parallels with straight folk feeling uncomfortable with the idea of being straight. There are reasons why they might, besides the old "The word for what I am is normal." nonsense (the usual objection to cis, along with "I've never heard that word before so I'm determined to be insulted by it"). A woman may be exclusively attracted to men, but completely reject the norms of heterosexual relationships that her culture presents to her. She may watch romantic movies and not recognise the role assigned to her within relationships; she may reject monogamy or marriage, she may not be attracted to small, quiet, bookish men in a culture that tells her to fancy macho hunks.

But straight is still the most likely way of describing her sexuality. You can still be straight and not fit into a world where the dynamics, depth and even timing of heterosexual relationships is strictly prescribed.  You can still be straight and experience discrimination based on your deviance from hetronormative roles, just as almost all cis women, at one time or another, have been made to feel that we are not living up to expectations of womanhood.

It's okay to call Tom Daley bisexual, even if he isn't.

Young Olympic diving hero Tom Daley talked publicly yesterday about being in a relationship with a man, provoking a huge variety of responses in my Twitter stream. These ranged from the romantic realism of "Oh good, I fancy Tom Daley and I'm a man, so there's hope for us yet!" to straight people coming out as straight in hilarious parody because, in their world, homophobia is a thing of the past... last week sometime, whatever, they're over it already.  But there was also an argument raging about what labels should be sewn on the young man's swimming trunks.

Some news outlets described Daley as gay when he had said he is still into girls. There were a deluge of complaints about bi erasure, followed by a second wave of scorn for anyone who described Daley as bi, given that he hadn't used the label himself:

Tom Daley has not said he is gay or bi. Let him choose his own label, if/when he wants to. - @kindjourneys

Find bi carping over media calling Tom Daley gay as annoying as the media calling every MSM gay. Project rigid sexual identity? No thanks. @MxsQueen.

(A deluge, as you see - there were many others but these were most direct and to the point).

On the same day, I read an article from last week, daringly entitled: Lesbianism: Sexual fluidity is a fact of life for women. The headline is misleading - the author, Stephanie Theobold doesn't actually claim that all women can experience profound shifts in who they're sexually attracted to, but does suggest a widespread degree of fluidity based on a great hodgepodge of evidence, some valid (the author herself has experienced such fluidity), and some irrelevant (glamorous straight interviewees expressing an enthusiasm for lesbianism - as does my Mum. She will physically cringe at a scene on telly where two women kiss, but on hearing that a woman is gay, she'll always say, "Well, it sort of makes sense - with another woman, you wouldn't have to be clearing up after her all the time.").

Human sexuality is fascinating and strange and labels are never ever going to cover it. In her article, Stephanie Theobold tries hard, referring to the fact she now identifies as a Kinsey 4. reminding me of folks who offer their Myers-Briggs results by way of introduction (and the fact you remember your MBTI results and offer them as important information about yourself says a lot, regardless of the actual result).

In fact, I can easily imagine a future whether someone will devise a Myers-Briggs type matrix to describe sexuality. You'd need more letters, of course. I'd guess you'd need at least four options for libido, ranging from asexual to highly sexual. Then at least four options for sexual preference - hetero, homo, bi and fluid. Of course, bisexual is complicated - many people reject bi as referring to two genders as opposed to homo and hetero, so we may need pansexual to clear that one up. For some people, being monogamous or polyamorous is something they feel is absolutely hard-wired, so maybe that should be included too.

Recently, a friend described themselves as sapiosexual (attracted primarily to the minds of others, rather than any particular shape of body) which implies yet another spectrum between sapiosexuals and... carnisexuals? - people for whom, sex is all about flesh and circus performers. Added to this is kink, which throws us into a complex web of multicoloured handkerchiefs,

In a culture which wants to place us all in one of two boxes - straight or gay - and where those boxes are loaded down with expectation, it is understandable that folks seek to define their own special box with great care. To describe myself as bisexual is necessarily an over-simplification. Bisexual is not a love story. Bisexual is not even a story about sex. It doesn't tell anyone anything about my behaviour, it isn't clear what it says about my feelings and it doesn't say whether this is how I am now, or this is how I've always been.

But as a political word, bisexual is just fine. Perhaps disability helps with this, partly because medical matters are far less interesting than sexual ones, but mostly because I'm used to separating the social and political effects of an identity (disability) from the personal mess of how I come to it (impairment, chronic illness, however else you'd phrase it).

This is why it is valid to talk about bisexuality in the context of Tom Daley. Not to say that he's bi in the sense of having joined our club and why isn't he waving our flag already. This isn't about labels, but merely description. Bless him, but the poor lad is already experiencing (hopefully unknowingly) prejudice as a bisexual man; the assumption that he must be gay, the assumption that, by loving a man, all attraction he claims to women is the folly of youth or a strategic ploy to avoid seeming too queer. He is also experiencing prejudice as a gay man, because of general assumption that he is and all the homophobia that follows.

All this becomes harder to describe if we can't use the word bisexual as opposed to experiences attraction towards his own gender and members of at least one other gender. The media assumption that a man who loves another man is gay is something which effects all bisexual people. It's okay to discuss that.

Same if we were talking about historic or fictional characters. Unless someone has identified the words they would choose themselves, we have no choice but to use the words that best describe the feelings or behaviour we witness (and sometimes we have to override folk - the protagonists from Brokeback Mountain insist that they're not queer, Liberace insisted he was straight, but we wouldn't be able to discuss their experiences without accepting that they are wrong.)

As queer people, we should reject the idea of rigid sexual identity. It shouldn't matter if anyone was born this way or happens to feel this way for the first time in their mid-seventies. But worrying about using a word like bisexual in this context is the anxiety that bisexual is something rigid, unwieldy, a mantle which, once placed on someone's shoulders, will stay on them for life. Tom Daley may never describe himself as bisexual. As disabled people, we're very used to famous and successful disabled people telling us that they don't see themselves as disabled. But if we're to talk about the way they're treated in the media and society at large, we need to use these words about them.

There are many contexts where it is inappropriate to presume a label. In conversation, we should avoid assumption and never demand that people use words they're not comfortable with. Describing famous people with words they wouldn't use themselves is very different from talking about our friends and acquaintances.

But if we want to promote a world where sexual identity does become politically irrelevant, where our labels become far more nuanced, flexible and fluid, then we need to remove the weight from the language we have to work with now, the language that everyone understands.

Sex, Looks and Obligation.

Louise Mensch (groan) has courted controversy (it's what she does for a living) with a series of blogs entitled What Men Want, which is absolutely everything you're afraid it might be. The reason Mensch gets any attention for this is that she repeated refers to herself as a feminist. Mumsnet published a debate between Mensch and the brilliant Glosswitch, in which Glosswitch takes care of business, but something Mensch said in this debate made me particularly cross:

"It's bemusing to me that you frame the notion of making an effort to look good for your man in terms of domestic abuse and passivity. This is not something I suggest men demand of women - any man who makes such demands should get you running away fast - but something that a loving female freely offers her man."

All abusive relationships are based on this sort of thing; if you love your man, you will do X. That is a demand. Since the absence of X, freely given, shows that you're not a loving person, what choice do you have?  Put on that dress or admit to being a heartless bitch.

I couldn't care less about Mensch and her version of feminism based on women being rich and getting richer (as she recently stated, she earned her privilege!).  But I am interested in commonplace messages which mess with people's lives, and this is one I'm both very familiar with and slightly removed from. I'm not a straight woman, so I've never felt any particular concern around what men want as opposed to what the people I fancy want. As such, my life experience and study of psychology has lead me to the radical yet bloody obvious conclusion that people want to be loved and beyond that, well, we're all different.

Yet we live in a world which attempts to apply capitalist principles to human relationships. Men and women in love are seen as entering into a mutually beneficial contract, where each provides a distinct set of goods and services to meet the other's desires in a series of orderly transactions. These desires are seen as distinct and complicated, which is why people (whose names sometimes begin with L) are able to make money talking about it, rather than people just talking to one another for free. It's all absolute bollocks of course - if it wasn't, we'd all know answers by now and there'd be no more money to be made.

However, apart from the self-help and wind-up industries, this stuff ruins lives. It is the foundation stone for abusive relationships (same-gender partners, parents, all abusers believe that their victims have natural obligations towards them, but heterosexual abusers are more regularly affirmed). It ruins sex because individuals are made to feel that there's a role to be performed. It makes many folk believe that they have little to offer because they're not minted, aren't cover-girl beautiful, can't bench-press a baby elephant and can't prepare a three-course meal without breaking a sweat and Auntie Eve's best china. It undermines some of the greatest sources of human happiness available to us, by making long-term romantic love seem like a mortgage deal.

So here is the truth about sex, looks and obligation, since I am as qualified as anyone else:

• Your looks are part of your identity. They may be a small part or a big part. It is really important to come to terms with what you look like, at the earliest possible juncture. As your looks change, try to come to terms with those changes. Our culture will get in your way, but do what you can.

• Wearing nice clothes helps in coming to terms with what you look like. Nice clothes are clothes you like the look of and feel comfortable in. Comfortable can mean a lot of things. You may feel comfortable in high-heels and a corset. You may feel comfortable in tweeds and a cravat.  You may feel comfortable in a floral print onesie. It's all fine.

• Similarly, looking after your appearance. Please wash sometimes. Beyond that, it's up to you.

• The physical appearance of others is important to the sexuality of most people, to a varying extent. Men tend to have their sexualities wired to the visual, exposed to multiple images of naked or partially-naked women from an early age (boys who don't fancy women naturally seek out other images). We know it's programming, because the kinds of women who are seen as sexually attractive vary between cultures and over time, and some secondary sexual characteristics - like under-arm hair - can be seen as unattractive despite its evolutionary origins. If the whole world were blind, we might have more sexy dolls or even bottles of womanly scent for men to discuss, critique and aid masturbation, in which case we would declare that men were intrinsically tactile or olfactory when it comes to sex. 

• The reasons this doesn't happen so much for women are multiple, but they include (a) the history of Western Culture is heavily dominated by straight men and what they wanted to see, (b) women aren't supposed to masturbate, (c) women are taught that for them, an investment in the looks of a potential partner is shallow, (d) women are taught to be more concerned about other aspects of a potential partner (and does he have a car? Aha, aha, aha...). Despite this, some women are extremely visual, enjoy visual erotica and care very deeply about their partner's looks. 

• There are absolutely no rules about what any given person of any gender will find physically attractive in a partner (let alone their clothes). There are very general rules around geometry and the faces and bodies we consider beautiful - the same applies to paintings and flowers. But look around you. Look at the couples you know. See? There is absolutely no accounting for taste.

• When two people are in love, they tend to find one another physically attractive. If this love endures, they will continue to find each other physically attractive through fluctuations in weight, pregnancy and the aftermath, hair-loss and all seven signs of ageing that Oil of Olay propose to protect you from (cardigans, Countryfile... I forget the others). People don't usually fall out of love because of issues around physical appearance - not appearance itself. Appearance may symbolise something - age, for example, or social standing (these things don't have to be reasonable) - and it is not on to have a Union Jack facial tattoo without consulting your partner. But love never died because someone's hair was a mess.

• The best way of making sure that your partner is happy is to look after them, demonstrate an ongoing interest in them, comfort them in sadness, support their endeavours, celebrate their triumphs and make sure that they know they are loved. There are no guarantees, but it is the best any of us have got to offer.  

• Sex is not something women give to men in exchange for affection, physical help, money or anything else. It is not a kindness. It is something that two or more people come together to do for their mutual enjoyment. It uses up a lot of energy and can make quite a mess, so if you ever find that you are trying to "make sex as pleasant as possible", I do wonder if it's worth the bother. Scrabble is pleasant.

• Being beautiful is not something women give to men in exchange for affection, physical help, money or anything else. But...

• Everybody in love cares how they are seen in the eyes of their lover (I mean this both metaphorically and literally). When they genuinely stop caring - apart from when their priorities are sensibly elsewhere, such as when unblocking a drain or suffering from a rotten cold - they are perhaps no longer in love. But this is the thing; (a) this care could mean a million different things, few of them involving a hair-dryer (Mensch seems really into blow-drying) and (b) it's not exactly a conscious effort. People in love act to please their partner, people in lust act to turn their partner on. This isn't owed, this isn't a duty or a kindness. That's the thing about things done "freely". You don't have to tell people what they need to do if they're already doing it freely. 

• Some people are turned on by nuns, some people are turned on by dressing as a nun. Some people are so turned on by the way their partner looks at them when they're dressed as a nun that they love dressing as a nun. Some people are so turned on by the way their partner behaves while dressed as a nun that they love their partner dressing as a nun. Some people just don't get the nun thing - they don't want to have sex with a nun, they don't want to dress up as one - but that doesn't mean we can't all have fun. That's all you need to know about pleasing a sexual partner through clothes and appearance. 

This is the truth. Anyone who tells you otherwise, gives you rules about love or sex, or about men, women and imaginary debts between them, is either (a) a liar (b) trying to make money out of you (c) trying to defend their own choices by pretending they are universal or (d) an abuser.

How Marriage Became More Meaningful

The Modern Man: Stephen fields calls from his investors whilst
ironing out deconstructed neckties for my wedding dress.

Equal marriage means so much to me.  Given that I'm a woman about to be married to a man, I don't think anyone realises just how much it matters.  It's so I can get married and not feel like a fraud.  It means I can have a wedding which doesn't make me feel closeted, because people like me can only marry if they happen to have partners of a certain gender. Not just yet, but soon enough, I will be able to marry whoever I like.

There's a certain type of social conservative who enthuses about marriage, but worries that it isn't what it used to be, weakened by decades of social change and legal reform.  To me, this is counter to everything I feel and observe about marriage. As an institution, I believe that marriage is getting stronger and stronger.

Things that have made marriage stronger and more meaningful include:


1. The ease of divorce means that folks are less likely to stay together in unhappy, loveless or abusive marriages because they can't get out of it.  Divorce is not easy. In court fees alone, with no legal advice, the least complicated divorce costs a little under £400 and will take about six months - marriage costs a little over £100 and can be carried out within 16 days. Divorce law is complicated, so if you're not on excellent terms, if there's money, property or children involved, the whole thing gets extremely difficult and costly. But it's doable and it's (largely) socially acceptable.

Marriage had to be far less meaningful when it was more commonplace for people who were unhappy together to be married. Where divorce was inaccessible, it wasn't uncommon for people to move on and start new relationships, have new lives and families whilst still being legally married to someone else because of the shame, cost and complication of divorce - the legalisation of divorce in the UK was brought about by a moral panic about people living in sin because they had separated from spouses, started again with new partners, but had no option to remarry.

Marriage could be made stronger by... no fault divorces.  In England and Wales, a couple may divorce on the grounds of separation after two years apart, but to get divorced any quicker, it has to be somebody's fault. I have known amicably splitting couples lie about adultery in order to speed things up. The only bar to no fault divorces is the idea that two adults, in the absence of adultery or ill treatment, might not know their own minds about the end of a relationship.

2. The social acceptability of cohabitation. The option of cohabitation means that most people know what they're getting into before they make a permanent commitment, folks can freely experiment with living arrangements and fewer people rush into marriage just because they're madly in love and need a social licence to spend all their time together for however long the passion is burning - even if it fizzles out within a few months. Meanwhile, couples who feel that marriage is not for them for whatever reason are no longer obliged to choose between biting the bullet of social convention or else meeting with stigma and discrimination.

My mother often described the anti-climax of the first months of my parents' marriage.  During those first few months - a particularly cold winter - they had to discover what it was to live independently from parents and what it was to live with one another, all of which would have been cool except that they'd had to promise forever before they got to experiment, negotiate and learn about themselves and how to get along. So they felt under tremendous pressure.

I reckon the acceptability of cohabitation has made things better even for people who don't cohabit before marriage, usually for religious reasons, because they seem to have learnt so much from the rest of us. In my parents' day, few people lived together before marriage, but there was no discussion about it either, you got married and worked it all out as you went along. These days, folks who want to jump into the deep end on their wedding day are encouraged to have thorough discussions about how they're going to organise themselves in everything from finances to sex.  And that's a good thing.

Marriage could be made stronger by... allowing some legal contract, other than marriage for people to become one another's next of kin.  This would benefit lots of people who are not married, whether they are living with a romantic partner, a friend, a sibling or if they are estranged from their official family (or don't have one) and want to nominate someone else to make decisions for them in an emergency, automatically inherit from them and so forth.


3. The (gradual) demise of the nuclear family as the ideal living arrangement.  So much focus of the resistance to marriage reform comes from the idea that the nuclear family is a great ideal. It's not. It was a short-lived middle class notion; working class people, who have nothing much to pass on and can't necessarily afford to move out of parental home or pay outsiders for childcare and other help, have always had a far more flexible attitude towards family. It's partly to do with blood, but also geography, history, circumstance, as well as love. Your uncles and aunts are not necessarily your parents' siblings. Step families prosper with less emphasis on biological relationships. Of course, poor people have poorer outcomes in education, health, employment and pretty much everything else. But they have tended to have a pragmatic attitude towards family; family are simply the people around you.

The nuclear family places the sole responsibility for children on two parents. It shuffles the rest of the family completely out of the way. If people don't marry or don't have children, they are not part of the club, a club which is isolating for those both within and without it.  It depends on everyone having enough money to live such an isolated life, which of course, fewer and fewer folk do.

I'm not about to celebrate the economic downturn or in particular, an economic shift which falls disproportionately on younger adults, who simply won't have the same opportunities as their parents. But it has forced us to be more flexible. Multi-generational households are suddenly much more common. People live in houseshares which become familial (not all are like that, but some are). Middle class people now speak of their "chosen family", which is what a lot of working class people would simply describe as "family".

All this makes marriage stronger, because it makes marriage supported and supportive to others. Couples do not need to sail out alone in the world and hope to sustain each other. When someone joins a family (formally or not), they become important to several people, not merely a partner for one individual.

I'm not sure I've explained this at all well, but never mind.

Marriage could be made stronger by... a cultural shift away from the idea that happy people come in units of two and single people are fundamentally alone in life. We drastically undervalue other relationships, friendship most of all. Romantic love is a truly wonderful thing, but it isn't radically distinct from other kinds of love, and love is what really matters. Happy people are people who have love in their lives, and that can come in many different forms.


4. Increasing Sexual Equality.

People have argued a lot about the origins of marriage in human society and what marriage is naturally about.  Clearly, nature is not a part of this; marriage is something people invented.  Fundamentally they invented it to organise and celebrate pair bonding and I'm sure in many cases, especially among ruling classes, property or children (principally, which woman bore which man's children) were a priority. But most people in the history of the world didn't have a lot of individual property and childcare tended to get shared out in the most convenient way within a community. Marriage exists because people have always partnered off - not everyone, and it's not our only sexual strategy but it is something humans do.  And since this is a fairly big deal in people's lives - like being born, becoming an adult or losing a loved one - people have tended to celebrate it and use the language of permanent change.

There are some folks who think that marriage is about men and women, because man is one kind of animal and woman is quite another and somehow, despite massive differences in comprehension, ability and desire, they somehow work well together (if they buy the right self-help books and listen to the right kind of religious leaders or relationship gurus - otherwise, the whole thing is hopeless).

But the truth is that private relationships between men and women can be condemned by a society where such expectations exist, where men and women don't have the same freedoms and opportunities. This isn't to say that there's an ideal feminist marriage in which both partners play exactly the same roles in every context which, if only we all subscribed to, we'd be sorted. But the more freedom - legal, financial and social - that both parties have, the more likely they are to negotiate and discover an arrangement that suits them. The less likely they are to believe that they can't really talk to each other about their needs, because people of their partner's gender are incapable of understanding. The less likely there is to be violence or abuse on either side.

Marriage could be made stronger by.... a cultural shift away from the idea of marriage or relationships as a goal and overarching source of fulfillment for women.  As it is, this places tremendous pressure on women to find a partner, exact commitment from them and then, single-handedly, manage the inevitably two-person job of a happy and healthy relationship. Women can stay in miserable relationships because they hold themselves responsible and fear being alone. Women can feel miserable about good relationships because their lives are unsatisfactory and they believed that marriage was supposed to fulfill them. Having a partner in life is not the same as a partner being a life.

Basically, marriage would be so much more meaningful in an egalitarian universe.  On which subject...

5. A growing acceptance of romantic and sexual diversity, Civil Partnerships and soon, coming to a wedding venue near you, Equal Marriage. 

There was time, not all that long ago, perhaps up until the mid-eighties, when it was extremely common for exclusively gay men and women to marry straight people.  Some of those marriages were mutually convenient arrangements between close friends but others, I'm sure, were absolute hell. Straight marriage got a lot more meaningful when being gay no longer necessitated complete secrecy. It got yet more meaningful when gay people began to have some options for becoming parents. These days, it is only those from extremely zealous religious backgrounds who feel the need to use straight marriage as a closet.

Equal marriage will mean that marriage is no longer even slightly about being straight. A marriage certificate will no longer be a certificate to say that your relationship is valid and superior to other relationships between people with the same strength of feeling and commitment towards one another.

If your a woman who finds a man you want to spend the rest of your life with, you climb up to the top of the nearest office block, church spire or silo and cry out "We're in love!". You don't cry, "We're so straight!" or as some Tory MPs seemed to think you might, "It would be typical for two people of our respective genders to have baby-making potential for at least the earlier portion of our adult lives, regardless of whether we're still young enough, each have the necessary equipment and chemical capacity or indeed, the slightest desire to have children! Hooray!" (People on the ground could never comprehend such a long sentence). 

Marriage could be made stronger by... ditching the gender binary in legal language around marriage (Why? Why on Earth is it still there now?) and trans folk who had their marriages dissolved as part of the gender recognition process, getting to have their marriages back (here's the tabled amendment).


My marriage will mean so much more to me because I could marry anyone.  It removes the element of straight privilege that only belongs to me by a double coincidence. It makes me part of something which is now so much more inclusive.  This is not the be all and end all of queer rights (not nearly) and marriage is by no means a perfect institution.  But in the last few weeks, the world has become a slightly better place.