Love The One You’re With–Made A Whole Lot Easier In The Days Of Gender Fluidity

Laura Dunphy had been brought up straight as an arrow – First Communion, dancing school, picnics and ice skating – and it was only in seventh grade that she began to notice the budding of Amelia Parsons, the girl next door who – she reflected much later on – was not unlike Nabokov’s Lolita on the lawn in New Hampshire, lovely, tanned, lithe jambes, sucking the last bit of lemonade through slightly rouged lips. 

She and Amelia became fast friends – buddies, teammates, confidantes – but never lovers, unless innocent caresses and light kisses counted. Of course they did; and Laura realized that since she wanted more than friendly caresses, she would have to be the man of the house. Amelia was diffident, Marsha coy, but Elicia ravishingly willing. 

All was well and  good at Country Day – her parents were too remote and traditional to even imagine their daughter in flagrante with her field hockey girlfriends; and the boys in her class were too retarded, obsessed about Kotex and girls’ bathrooms to suspect anything.  Life went on swimmingly, sexually, and more delightfully than Laura could ever have imagined.

Yet, like most pre-teen and early-teenage girls Laura did not think of herself as a lesbian.  Yes she was enamored of Elicia, loved sex with her, as wet and warm as the grass on the fifteenth fairway where they wrestled and tumbled and held each other on hot July nights.

As much as she loved Elicia, there was something missing.  All the fondling, sucking, fingering, and French kisses missed the point.  Her self was empty, and no girl or mail order dildo would satisfy.  So she, not unlike her seductive, vampy mother, put on low cut dress, perfume, and heels and – given the indiscriminate horniness of the boys in New Brighton – quickly bedded Robbie Phillips, captain of the football team, son of old New Englanders who summered on the Vineyard and wintered in Gstaad.

So that was what the fuss was all about, Laura said to herself.  If her emptiness needed to be filled, it would not be with the likes of Robbie Phillips or the dildo of Mary Flannagan.  

Her college years were ones of desultory sex – a bit of this from Harvard boys, a bit of that from Radcliffe girls; and sometimes all together, the best of all where identifying pricks or cunts did not matter in the least. 

Life after college was perfunctory and predictable – law school, K Street, Bernstein, Fein, & Lefkowitz attorneys at law before the Supreme Court – all the right moves; but such maneuvers were as dry as toast, jousting, recollection, and precedent when what she thought of between chapters was sex.

She asked herself these questions at the height of the gender revolution.  Why, asked progressive activists, should anyone be stuck in 19th century sexuality, the missionary position, and husband-and-wife lawn chairs?  We are at the stage, they proselytized, when man-woman intercourse is meaningless.  Biological sexual definition means nothing – nothing but a conservative construct to preserve and protect antediluvian ideas and a Kinder, Küche, Kirche subjugating patriarchy.

Not only that, the obverse – gay sex – is equally irrelevant.  Same-sex relations are no more meaningful, purposeful, or satisfying than suburban, once-a-week male-female coupling.  The sexual revolution, they said, has finally disposed of both and replaced them with the gender spectrum.  The two sexes, male and female, no matter how configured, are as old fashioned as peach cobblers; and only a free-choice, potpourri, and love the one you’re with sexuality can reflect the inclusive, diverse zeitgeist of the the ‘20s.

It was a heady time for Laura – tits-and-ass on Monday; nice, homey, under-the-covers kisses on Thursday, and randy, raunchy show-it-all Folsom Street Fair voyeurism on the weekend.  Under the new sexual algorithm, she sometimes opted for being a man dressed like a woman who paid male prostitutes; sometimes a girly girly girl who bedded Bernal Heights tough girls; or even sometimes a straight, suited, professional senior executive undressed at the Empress Suite at the Mayflower for a World Bank executive.

Why did it take so long for the gender spectrum to be revealed? Credit had to be given to the Catholic Church inter alia for keeping the lid on it for so long; to St. Paul, the apostles, and Augustine of Hippo; but now it was her time, another time, a post-Biblical sexual insurrection.

Of course having sex with whomever -  transgender harlequins parading as Blanche Dubois and Scarlet O’Hara, Humboldt County bearded bears on Harleys, Farmington ingenues, and Park Avenue matrons -  lost its luster very quickly.  Circuses come and go, and nothing is left but flattened grass and empty cups.

Edward Albee, Shakespeare, and Eugene O’Neill had it right from the beginning.  There is no replacing sexual – heterosexual dynamics – in the road to maturity.  It has always been so since the days of Esther, Jacob, and Methuselah, the stories of Deuteronomy and Kings, and who begot whom.  Everything else is a pay-as-you-go diversion.

There will always be gay men and women in all societies; but they are and will always remain in small proportion.  The rest is histrionics and imaginative ‘inclusivity’.  A fun weekend in Provincetown or San Francisco, but as defining moments and movements in the American social scene?  Hardly. 

“I tapped that ass”, Laura said, but shortly afterwards, went home and straight. 

Science has concluded that a certain percentage of any population is gay by genetic design – a small, insignificant percentage, but an influential one; and one, given the overwhelming heterosexual majority, determined to preserve its hegemony.  The LGBTQ community has been a model for self-promotion.  It has taken but a few decades for it to be recognized as a legitimate sexual minority; and only a few more for it to promote its ‘alternative’ lifestyle as progressive and advanced.  So much so that primary school children are being taught that biological sexuality is irrelevant, outdated, and meaningless. Sexual choice was what God really intended, not his-and-her bathroom towels. 

Laura married, moved to Short Hills, had two children who went to Harvard and Yale, and never looked back.  She had begun right, righteous, and on the right track; was seduced by progressive cant and anti-historical revisionism; then returned to herself, her biological template, and common sense.  She had to admit it was fun while it lasted – those Bernal Heights women were hot, and those Castro cruisers even hotter; and Bay to Breakers was more fun than Halloween – but a passing fancy, a vaudevillian show, a delightful sexual interlude, nothing more.