Paul’s history shows one lifestyle of a healthy bisexual. Is hetero-phobia on the part of the homosexual and homophobia on the part of the heterosexual necessary? Is not the inability to achieve emotional intimacy with members of both sexes a crippling example of surplus repression? Does the possibility of intimacy, which might or might not lead to sexuality, need to be foresworn because we are hetero-and homophobic? Is not the ability to be emotionally intimate with both sexes a prerequisite for a richer, fuller life?
PART II: BISEXUALITY AND HEALTH
CHAPTER 5
The Troubled Bisexual—The Healthy Bisexual
In and of itself, bisexuality is neither good nor bad, black nor white, healthy nor neurotic. Bisexual individuals, however, can be located somewhere on the continuum between healthy and troubled, if not in terms of black and white.
When a subject (especially a sexual condition) that is new to the consciousness of a society or culture first begins to be discussed, either/or conclusions about the psychosexual validity of the subject are readily jumped to. One such conclusion is that the only state that is 100 percent pure is heterosexuality. Even if a disproportionate number of heterosexuals are found to be heterosexually neurotic, no stones are cast at the condition. The condition is not seen as the problem. The majority, so to speak, rules. In some cases, however, the heterosexual condition is the problem. But so entrenched in people’s minds is the idea that the heterosexual way is the only virtuous way that its purity goes unchallenged, even in the most enlightened circles.
Homosexuals (including lesbians) and bisexuals, on the other hand, find that they must defend homosexuality and bisexuality as such; moreover, of the three groups, these two alone must defend their condition even at the highest level and the “best” particular examples that are manifested, let alone the “lowest” forms they take.
The highest level of any sexual orientation could be defined as those expressions of it that involve the greatest degrees of intimacy, from simple human concern to the complex love of two people in a long-term relationship. In saying this I don’t mean to put sex for its own sake on a lower rung. When speaking of higher forms of sexual expression, the particular situation, circumstances, and people involved must all be taken into account.
To what degree is “bisexual neurosis” what the experts say it is? Before we can attempt to answer that, we must ask a more basic question: What is neurosis?
If there is one question above all others has been given no rest in the last half century, this is a strong contender. So with due apology I offer two points of view on it–one more or less generally held definition, and one from Dr. Karen Horney. The reader is invited to look into others.
According to Dr. Horney neurosis is a total personality disturbance with its source in distorted parent-child relationships, and characterized by distortion in the individual’s relationships with others and with the self, stemming from emotional conflicts and anxiety, and resulting in rigidity, suffering, impairment of functioning, and consequently a wide discrepancy between potential and achievement.
A more general definition, given by Dr. Milton H. Miller in the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, edited by Freedman and Kaplan, is that neurosis is a syndrome characterized by psychological pain and anxiety, implying a kind of misadaptation that restricts the individual’s overall judgment, his or her ability to make good contact with reality, and his or her capacity to relate effectively with others in the environment. Within this basic syndrome are a number of psychoneurotic reactions: anxiety neurosis, phobic neurosis, obsessive-compulsive neurosis, depressive neurosis, etc.
Many say that bisexuals generally do not have the capacity to fall in love with one person, that in fact the majority of bisexuals experience only fondness, not love. I think this statement would make more sense if it began: “Neurotic or troubled bisexuals generally....”
Dr. Charles Socarides, a New York psychiatrist, makes, it seems to me, a similar omission: “They’re [bisexuals] selling a phony sexual Utopia in which the kingdom of the orgasm will supposedly replace the house of the ego.” This statement, too, would make more sense if it began: “Neurotic bisexuals are selling…” Let’s experiment for a minute with those opening words: “Neurotic homosexuals are selling....” “Neurotic heterosexuals are selling....” It works in all three situations. Dr. Socarides is firing broadside at a large segment of the population on the basis of sexual preference. Does he mean to suggest that heterosexuals, since the onset of the sexual revolution, have not built altars to the orgasm at the expense of the ego? Or that homosexuals are not playing this losing game as well? To be honest, isn’t a sizable proportion of the hetero-, homo-, and bisexual population, men and women, using sex in unfulfilling, destructive-neurotic-ways?
Dr. Natalie Shainess, a New York psychoanalyst, adds her bit of fabric to the patchwork of mythology about bisexuality: “The constant ricocheting from one sex to the other can create unstable friendships as well as a chaotic home life. If there are children involved this may confuse their sense of sexual identity.”
Who would deny this? No reasonable person would deny that casual sex is sometimes indulged in at the expense of deep-seated love. But what these experts are commenting on is bisexuality in its neurotic and troubled condition. I would suggest only that their observations apply solely to troubled individual bisexuals–as well as hetero- and homosexuals–and not to the groups of people as a whole. Otherwise we regress back to the paranoid notions that all blacks are lazy, all Irish drunkards, all Poles stupid, all Italians gangsters, all Germans mass murderers, all WASPs unfeeling, all Jews economic conspirators, etc. It’s too simple. It’s too easy. It leads to dangerous mob-think.
To quote from Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation: “The more mentally backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.” We all have backwoods areas in our minds that feed, in darkness, on this evil. The groups most vulnerable to such brands of ridicule are those without the cultural rights to the concept of what is or is not “normal.” The concept of normalcy is, in itself, only theoretical. As such, it is constantly changing, in much the manner of fashions in clothes. “Normal” is not a scientific, or mathematical equation, fixed for all time. “Normal” is only a set of values defined for the purpose of maintaining or securing economic, political, or other advantages for the society–or more likely, some portion of the society. When such values and the practices they may give rise to–the burning of witches, enslavement of Africans–become obsolete, they are changed or abandoned.
Margaret Mead had this to say about traditional attitudes in an article entitled “Bisexuality: What’s It All About?”:
Changing traditional attitudes toward homosexuality is in itself a mind-expanding experience for most people. But we shall not really succeed in discarding the straightjacket of our own cultural beliefs about sexual choice if we fail to come to terms with the well-documented, normal human capacity to love members of both sexes.
It is the quality of loving, not the gender of love’s objects, that should come under fire. The quality of bisexual loving can be as high as the quality of heterosexual or homosexual loving. In our time the quality of all loving may be suspect, but it is not the responsibility of one group to carry the entire burden of neurotic behavior for a whole society.
Neurotic functioning is the evil genie who rides on the back of compulsive behavior. Sexual activity is one of the time-worn ways of getting the genie off our backs. But if the sex is compulsive, the genie does not go away; he sleeps, and because we no longer feel his hot breath on our necks, we experience the illusion of relief for a short while, until the genie wakes up to ride once again. The people most prone to this kind of behavior are the generally fearful, who must continually prove to themselves that they are not unlovable, unworthy, or otherwise unfit.
To act out a fantasy, both the props and the people involved need to be
present. If you imagine an orgy of eating grapes fresh from the vine with your lover, all must be present and accounted for to make the dream come true. Because they live every day with the possibility of sexual intimacy with both genders, bisexuals, including troubled bisexuals, have more potential partners than do homo- and heterosexuals. For example: A heterosexual theatrical agent for showgirls has, if he is neurotic, more opportunity to blunt his senses with compulsive sexuality than, let’s say, a heterosexual biology teacher in an all-boys school. The neurotic teacher would, if he could, but because he can’t to the same extent as the agent, he enjoys a reputation for being safe and sane. The agent, on the other hand, enjoys a bad reputation, in spite of the fact that a healthy proportion of theatrical agents presumably are not hopping into and out of bed with their clients.
The bisexual, like the agent, has more opportunity for temptation. The healthy bisexual, like the healthy agent, uses his or her opportunities to pursue intimacy on all levels, allowing sexuality its place but not allowing it to become compulsive.
In Neurosis and Human Growth, Dr. Karen Horney makes the point that sexuality is frequently put to the service of neurotic needs because of the host of inhibitions and fears that fall into the bottomless pit of useless anxiety.
... All of these factors may result in the neurotic patient’s having sexual relations not because he wants them but because he should please his partner; because he must have a sign of being wanted or loved; because he must allay some anxiety; because he must prove his mastery and potency, etc. Sexual relations, in other words, are less determined by his real wishes and feelings than by the drive to satisfy some compulsive needs.
Flexibility would seem an uncontestably healthy quality, essential to the enjoyment of life’s variety. Without it a person’s outlook and inner world become increasingly narrow, to the ultimate extreme of disabling rigidity. But flexibility without purpose can pave the way to self-destruction. Dr. Horney continues:
... Sexual activities become not only a release of sexual tensions but also of manifold nonsexual psychic tensions. They can be a vehicle to drain self-contempt (in masochistic activities) or a means to act out self-torment by sexual degrading or tormenting of others (sadistic practices). They form one of the most frequent ways of allaying anxiety. The individuals themselves are unaware of such connections. They may not even be aware of being under a particular tension, or of having anxiety, but merely experience a rising sexual excitement or desire.... A patient may for instance come closer to experiencing his self-hate, and suddenly there emerge plans or fantasies of sleeping with some girl. Or he may talk about some weakness in himself which he profoundly despises, and have sadistic fantasies of torturing somebody weaker than he is.
So, the uses to which opportunities and flexibility are put depend on the individual’s psychic health, not on his or her sexuality. Self-hate is no more typical of one sexual-preference group than another, on the other hand, in any individual with preexisting troubles or neuroses, self-hate may grow–feed on itself–the more that it finds opportunities or outlets in compulsive behavior–much the same way someone with a history of heart trouble is more at risk from a diet of rich food and drink.
One problem that is peculiar to some troubled bisexuals is a lack of confidence in their gender identification. This is often the case with a man or woman who is not bisexual at all but homosexual, and afraid to let go of what is not actually an attraction to the opposite sex but rather an allegiance to an externally imposed idea usually rooted in the values of society. “I feel I can find my way back as long as I’m bisexual,” one patient said to me. “Back to where?” I asked. “To the straight life,” he answered. I then asked how he viewed the gay alternative. “Oh no,” he insisted, “otherwise why would I be bisexual?”
Fears of intimacy and of being hurt drive people to seek safety in innumerable ways. For some people, bisexuality may be one of the more extreme suits of armor chosen for this purpose. Unconsciously reasoning that a moving target is harder to hit, they keep on the run, as it were, avoiding being pinned down to one sexual identity. But in attempting to circumvent the pain of loving and being loved, they more often fulfill their own worst fears.
The male bisexual may be quite healthy in his relationships with women but troubled in his sexual activity with men. Or he may have healthy relationships with men but be troubled in his dealings with women. And he can have troubles with both genders. In the first case he has the neurotic problems of the homosexual, in the second of the heterosexual, and in the third his neurotic sexual manifestations are peculiar to the bisexual. And the troubles aren’t necessarily limited to sex. They can extend to all kinds of social, interpersonal contact.
Imagine a happily married man who also needs to express his sexuality with men. Imagine he is a successful businessman, living in a quiet, upper-middle-class town in, say, Connecticut, and working in a prestigious corner office of a Wall Street skyscraper. This man has a lot at stake in keeping up appearances. The pressure not to step out of line, not to embarrass his class, his town, his family and, most of all, the company, causes him deep anguish. No matter what solution this person finds to express his bisexual needs, socially induced guilt and shame will almost ensure his developing some neurotic functioning despite the fact that he may be quite healthy in other ways. In many such cases, the strain of maintaining a cover eventually catches up. The man is lost in problems imposed on him by elements beyond his control–unless he gives up what he’s spent a lifetime building. This man is a troubled bisexual, because the world in which he seeks his identity is collectively opposed to the psychosexual “extreme” of his bisexuality.
Imagine a man or woman having difficulty with a spouse or lover of the opposite sex. Rather than face the difficulty, the person may resort to the typical troubled bisexual behavior pattern of running for comfort to someone of the same sex. This is a clear carry-over from childhood when, because one parent did not meet the child’s real or imagined needs, he/she ran to the other parent. This bisexual runs from problems inherent in all relationships by periodically shutting the door on one sex and opening it on the other, shuttling back and forth in an endless, loveless game where no one wins, everyone loses.
In an article on homosexuality in The New York Times, Robert Gould distinguished two types of neurotic homosexuals.
First, there are those who are disturbed and whose homosexuality reflects that disturbance symptomatically. An intense fear or hatred of the opposite sex would indeed constitute disorder, manifested in homosexual behavior.
He goes on to describe a second type of person for whom the neurosis is not related to the homosexuality itself. In this case the neurotic person also just happens to be homosexual. This distinction is equally useful in analyzing neurotic behavior patterns of the bisexual and heterosexual.
Yes, the troubled bisexual exists, and exhibits neuroses, but the healthy bisexual also exists, and flourishes, within his or her bisexuality.
Does the bisexual’s ability to be intimate with both sexes raise more problems than it solves? Certainly a menu with many choices requires a more selective intelligence than one offering few. The necessity to discriminate no doubt confuses some people (as we’ve seen with the troubled bisexual), particularly at first. But loneliness is a great equalizer. Loneliness can be as democratic a condition as death. It respects no economic or class boundaries. Loneliness results from an absence of intimacy. The inability to be intimate is a condition that has grown over the centuries. Our preoccupation with material things intensifies it. Psychosexual health is best served by a flexible outlook on love and intimacy. Such flexibility relieves pressure on both the love objects chosen and on the chooser.
None of this is meant to be advocacy of sexual variety for its own sake. It is the knowing that it is there for the choosing, the awareness of and openness to sexual choice itself, that is liberating. Bisexuality itself may be less important than the possibility of it–the lack of fear of it. Intim
acy doesn’t require sexuality, sexuality does not require intimacy; but when brought together in combination they equal more than the sum of their parts. The healthy bisexual having the potential of sex combined with intimacy with both male and female has the possibility of enhanced sexual love.
It’s true that some bisexuals play both ends against the middle in that they use people of both genders as sexual objects. To the extent they do, they’re unhealthy and their bisexuality is unhealthy. At his or her best, the bisexual sees potential sexual partners first as human beings and then as sexual objects.
The bisexuals interviewed and studied for this book were all asked the question: “What are your feelings on your own bisexuality and bisexuality in general?” The answer was almost always the same: “Wholeness.” Without exception healthy bisexuals (and some troubled bisexuals) speak of this feeling of wholeness, of feeling complete in the realization that the love of both men and women is there–if and when they need it. The difference between the healthy and the troubled bisexual can be measured by their degree of acceptance of this capacity as a responsibility as well as a need. The healthy bisexual uses freedom as a means for growth, for giving as well as getting intimacy.
Many bisexuals today are in danger of choosing heterosexuality or homosexuality merely because of the pressure put on them by our culture. Bisexuality is not considered a “normal” possibility by most orthodox psychiatrists. The pathological connotation that has been put on bisexuality for centuries has become dogma and has a near-holy place in the traditional psychiatric attitude. (Wilhelm Stekel, in a minority opinion, disagrees: “... Since no person overcomes completely his homosexual tendencies, everyone carries within himself the predisposition to neurosis. The stronger the repression, the stronger is also the neurotic reaction.... In the case of the homosexual the repressed and incompletely conquered heterosexuality furnishes the disposition towards neurosis.... These generalizations already show that the healthy person must act as a bisexual being.”)
The Bisexual Option Page 7
