Sex vs. Sexuality

Whenever I want to infuriate myself, I like to go read the Yahoo comments on various articles concerning LGBT issues. Inevitably, there will be a comment along the lines of “i’m sick of hering about gay ppl! i don’t want to no about wut ur doing in ur bedroom!” and I find myself shaking my head at the screen muttering, “Sex and sexuality are not the same thing!” Considering one of the major focuses in the readings this week revolved around sexuality as a social construct, I thought this would be a good time to discuss sex versus sexuality.

While sex and sexuality are often considered one in the same, they should not be seen as interchangeable. Sexuality, as we have read, is a complicated system of identification that humanity is constantly trying to extract the “truth” from, as Foucault puts it—and will probably never be entirely successful, as Weeks explains of sexologists. Sex, on the other hand, is the deployment of sexuality through specific sexual acts—which comes with its own set of truths and complications. In my opinion, these distinctions allow the two to exist independently. To exemplify this point, I introduce the case of Project Runway’s Tim Gunn. Gunn is openly homosexual, and yet has remained celibate for 29 years. Most would say Gunn’s situation is highly unusual, but I think it highlights an important issue with regards to how our society views the intertwining of sex and sexuality.

This leads into the idea of sexuality being a social construct. I believe that the modern idea of sexuality—that is, the labels used to describe a person’s sexual affinities—is a social construct. This is not to say that sexuality is not a legitimate way to identify one’s preferences, but rather that the modern discourse, as Foucault explains, rose with the medicalization of sex in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. This is where the “myth that the homosexual was born circa 1869” (Peiss, 11) comes from—because that was the time in which same-sex attraction was correlated to a word, though we now know that the activity of same-sex relations goes back as far as Ancient Greece.

Sexuality is comprised of words intended to describe an idea, making it a construct of society. It is important to note that I also believe that language is a social construct. Sex and sexuality are like speaking and language. Sex and speaking are physical acts executed with the body. Sexuality and language are concepts—their deployment being a social construction—executed with the mind. They were created by society to help us better comprehend that that this machine is a “blender” and that that man is a “homosexual”. They are nothing but representative labels that our culture has agreed to use uniformly. Now, this should not diminish their importance or force them into a falsified existence. Sexuality is incredibly valid and valuable and a singular definition for its existence often does not suffice. I think Weeks put it best when he said, “Sexuality has a history, or more realistically, many histories, each of which needs to be understood both in its uniqueness and as part of an intricate pattern.” (6)

Tags: Foucault, Norton, Peiss, sex, Sexuality, social constructs, Weeks

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2013 at 3:38 am and is filed under February 14, Nadia Cook-Loshilov. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.