I kissed a girl and I liked it. words by roberto cialdella
I kissed a girl and I liked it.
Believe you me when I tell you I cringed while typing the title. Much as I revile songstress Katy Perry (her other song to receive any airplay is titled ‘Ur so gay’) no other piece of pop phenomena currently embodies the incongruities between today’s liberal society and sexuality, especially when it comes to flexible sexuality. Given its longevity in the charts, her song has been hailed as the song of the summer, while ladling praises for dealing with issues of sexual experimentation. Meantime, today’s gossip mags are replete with images of Lindsay switching sides and television series like Sex In The City and The O.C. have tapped into the cultural curiosity. Girls just want to have fun, right? The majority of people view female bisexuality or girl-on-girl experimentation as acceptable, normal fun, and the apex of a man’s fantasy. Why is it that the flip side- a man experimenting with another man- is unanimously categorized as latent homosexuality? In bizarro-world terms, Madonna and Spears’ commentary on gay marriage through a shared kiss on live television just would not translate the same, at this point in society, if Timbaland and Timberlake were the ones swapping spit. Ask anyone and they will keenly comment that homosexual behaviour in a straight man is tantamount to him being homosexual. For many reasons I’ve become simply inquisitive: Why the double standard? No
one dares suggest that a gay man who experiments with a woman means he is in fact secretly straight. This is flawed logic at work. LGBTer’s, straight women and men alike frown upon, in various ways, the idea of straight men experimenting with other men. Straight women, who most likely engaged in such activity at least once in their life, despise the idea as it presents another viable threat to their relationships and gay men see it as another closet case in denial. I speak from experience. No one likes, pardon my French, to be the butt end of someone’s (drunken) experimental phase, be it for one night or a month, especially if one feels profound attraction or affection for the person in question. Seeking to be fairly objective on the subject I will consider that a number of studies and tests actually suggest that a woman’s sexuality is indeed more fluid and ambiguous than a man’s. A 2004 experiment involved women and men made to watch video clips while a machine verified genital arousal at all times. The men reacted accordingly to their orientation but women reacted to the level of sensuality on display rather than gender. A New York Times article published on the matter in June, entitled ‘Straight with an asterisk’ contributes that it ‘adds to a growing body of scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, rather than as an either-or phenomenon’. Experimentation amongst women has gained such momentum that a term has been coined on some American college campuses: ‘LUG’ or Lesbian until graduation. OK. Women more than surely DO follow such tendencies. But commencing with historical data and trickling all the way down to proven scientific facts, studies and experiments put forth by pioneers such as Kinsey, Krafft-Ebing and Freud: we can all agree experimentation is not exclusive to the feminine sex. The famous Kinsey scale, in tandem with the Klein sexual orientation grid, indicated most of us rank somewhere in between either exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. Freud firmly believed adolescent homosexuality simply served to include another person in aiding in the pro-
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