Abstract
In the past three decades, the categorical imperative in contemporary analysis of sexuality, has been undermined by an unyielding critical assault from queer theories. Sexual fluidity of the postmodern subject, it has been argued, cannot be reduced to any specific linguistic designation; and throwing in more letters to the already dense word of ‘LGBTQA,’ would only create a parody of a once-effective mode of representing the complexity of the human sexual landscape. Ritch Savin-Williams’s Mostly Straight begins with the assumption that, as long as the letter ‘S’ for straight does not appear in that initialism as just one sexual orientation among others, adding more possibilities to our measures of sexuality is the most plausible way to deconstruct the ideology of heterosexuality.
Surgically carving out yet another thin slice from the monolithic body of heteronormativity, Savin-Williams isolates a new identity called ‘mostly heterosexuality.’ It has been profiled here as a young man who is almost always sexually and romantically attracted to women, and yet at the same time, is able to acknowledge the same feelings for men. Just like straight men, and in sharp contrast to bisexual men, he never acts on those fantasies. None of the 40 mostly straight men interviewed for this study, has actually dated a man (p. 159). Although Mostly Straight does not offer a Kinseyian ontological finding, national statistics in 2016 (p. viii) has corroborated what Savin-Williams is delineating: 6% of young men marked their sexual attractions as ‘mostly opposite sex’.
Each time, the author follows a similar pattern to establish his interviewees’ heterosexuality and then, through further questions about their life stories, he taints the exclusivity of their apparent straightness. This process of queering a subject, usually ends with a self-conscious awareness like this: ‘Thus he identifies as mostly straight.’ While Savin-Williams relies heavily on his interviewees’ accounts and analyses, he also includes other lines of argument to support the existence of ‘mostly straight’ as a separate identity. According to one hypothesis, slight sexual and romantic attraction among men is consistent with evolutionary theories (p. 220) in that, such bonding has been probably essential in maintaining a certain degree of camaraderie that motivates men to protect each other in battles or to collaborate in hunting, and thus giving us an evolutionary advantage.
Despite the apparent similarities that revolve around the notion of displaced sexuality among straight men, Mostly Straight stands firmly in contrast to studies such as Jane Ward’s Not Gay (2015), which is largely focused on behavior. While in her study, heterosexual white men who have sex with other straight men reject any significant queer reading of who they are, Savin-Williams is interested in ‘the romantic orientation’ of men who experience a slight degree of discrepancy between the gender they may fall in love with and the gender they have sex with. His men are usually politically progressive millennials whose queer side cannot be fulfilled through ‘wild’ rituals of hazing in fraternities. Their desire is informed by the ‘positive’ image of cool, out, gay men like Anderson Cooper or Tim Cook, and could be understood as a strategy for being slightly ‘edgy and provocative’ (p. 222).
Through its dynamic structure, the book makes for a fresh read, but at times, readers remain blissfully unaware of numerous studies that have tried to describe similar undercurrents in contemporary sexualities. There is no systematic citation and the author records the resources in a few unnumbered endnotes. The evidence often lack rigor. Statements such as ‘I definitely had my first bromance in the kindergarten’ (p. 132), the unchecked quirky logic of a vlogger (p. 165), and solemn references to Urban Dictionary, undercut the accuracy of the analyses. But there are more important ambiguities that persist, even deepen, through the course of the book. What does ‘mostly’ mean when we are asked to accept a person who says he is 99% attracted to women, as Ben does (p. 132), as ‘mostly’ straight? Or ‘fluid’ (p. 136). The author’s ‘Musings,’ at the end of each interview attempt to map such accounts into his five-point scheme of evidence which will be introduced later on as an ‘Appendix’. But these musings mostly take the respondents’ accounts at face value, and in the absence of a critical intervention, analysis resembles something like a survey of attitudes towards sex.
Although Mostly Straight is about ‘sexual fluidity among men,’ it does not depart from differentiation to embrace an unbroken sexual continuum on which people are in deep flux. Quite the opposite, one of the five criteria developed by the author (p. 218) to support the existence of mostly heterosexuality as a distinct category, is the stability and persistence of a mostly straight man’s self-perception of his sexuality. Savin-Williams is arguing for a new taxonomy to accommodate non-normative sexualities, scripted by individuals who are now ready to break ranks with straightness. Instead of proposing a radical alternative, he offers the possibility of a new identity politics that engages with and infiltrates heterosexuality. This argument, however, needs to address one key assumption: in order to undo hegemonic masculinity, we still need sexual identities.