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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
The latest semantic ploy to keep sexual options open really pisses me off.
Nov 15, 2000 | There is nothing like teaching college students to make a person feel hopelessly out-of-date. This fact first hit me at the tender age of 30. I was teaching what I thought was the hippest version of sociology imaginable. As part of my haute hipness, I had included readings on Elvis Presley. None of the students, however, had the faintest idea who Elvis Presley was. One thought that he might have been an actor. Another said she thought he had invented a diet because he had always been fat.
The generation gap between the students and me was bad enough, but then my teaching assistant, a nice man who was neither as young as they nor as old as I, decided to help me communicate more effectively the King's cultural significance. "Elvis Presley," he explained to the students, "was someone our parents used to listen to. He sang this stuff called rock 'n' roll. It came before rap music."
The students nodded their heads, as if they had just remembered that rap music did not always exist. I shook mine, having realized for the first time that Elvis really was dead. And in Elvis' death, I felt my own mortality.
Faced with the eternal youth of college students, my own aging can only become more obvious with each passing semester. I vowed to accept this fact gracefully and never again try to wow them with my knowledge of popular culture.
But now it's not just popular culture that divides us. It's sexuality as well. Oh I don't mean straight, gay or bi. I don't even mean queer. What I'm talking about here is "heteroflexibility."
If you don't know what that is, it's time to admit that you're as out of it as I am. Heteroflexibility is the newest permutation of sexual identity. According to my students, a person uses heteroflexibility in the first person, as in "I'm heteroflexible." This means that the person has or intends to have a primarily heterosexual lifestyle, with a primary sexual and emotional attachment to someone of the opposite sex. But that person remains open to sexual encounters and even relationships with persons of the same sex. It is a rejection of bisexuality since the inevitable question that comes up in bisexuality is one of preference, and the preference of the heteroflexible is quite clear.
Heteroflexible, I am told, is a lighthearted attempt to stick with heterosexual identification while still "getting in on the fun of homosexual pleasures." One student, Lisa, explained it like this: "Heteroflexibility is Ally McBeal kissing Ling." I pretended I knew what she was talking about, but of course I didn't (and not just because I don't watch television).
My reaction was predictable. I was ashamed of my own inability to stay current, and I was also deeply pissed. How could these kids go and invent yet another identity when "we" solved that problem for them in the 1980s and '90s? The word they were looking for was "queer" or even "bisexual," damnit. I was angry that they would throw out the politics and the struggles of naming that had come before them. And what did they throw it out for? A monstrosity of a word, a mix of sexology and yoga practices.
