MEN MATESHIP MARRIAGE

Dedication

Dedicated to my best mate, Patricia, and to our daughters,

Sue and Lesley, and their own good mates in life.

Contents

Cover

Dedication

Introduction

Part 1:

Marriage and masculinity

CHAPTER 1 What makes a man a man?

CHAPTER 2 Locating masculinity in the Australian context

CHAPTER 3 The male mateship myth

Part 2:

Mateship and marriage in Australia

CHAPTER 4 Men and the challenges of marriage

CHAPTER 5 Finding a mate: courtship and marriage

CHAPTER 6 Companionship and self-disclosure

CHAPTER 7 Building the nest

CHAPTER 8 Men as fathers

Part 3:

Mates facing uncertainty

CHAPTER 9 Marriage is good for you

CHAPTER 10 Divorce damage and the future of marriage

CHAPTER 11 The way forward

Notes

Reference list

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Introduction

Wot wus I slung ‘ere for? An’ wot’s the good

Of yearnin’ after any ideal tart? …

Ar, if a bloke wus only understood!

‘E’s got a ‘eart;

‘E’s got a soul inside ‘im, poor or rich.

But wot’s the use, when ‘Eaven’s crool’d ‘is pitch?

C.J. Dennis, ‘The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke’.

Every time I fly into Sydney or Melbourne, the suburban red roofs and green backyards loom larger and I think, ‘Something good must be going on down there’.

After twenty years of doing family research, I decided it was time to explore what it is that keeps most men, women and children happily engaged in what we loosely call ‘the family’.

Men, Mateship, Marriage aims to look closely at what men and women have done and can do together, serving their mutual interests for intimacy and autonomy, rather than continuing the old and somewhat boring argument about which side is right or wrong. As my ninety-year-old father-in-law put it recently, ‘The central thing in society is the family – to be independently dependent.’ (though his eighty-nine-year-old wife would certainly say she had more of the latter than the former).

Why is it that the overwhelming choice made by the vast bulk of women and men in modern society (as in every society throughout history) has been to find a partner, have a family and live together in a common union of activity and purpose? There’s something important going on here, and this book intends to explore it.

Men, Mateship, Marriage also aims to explore why men become what they are, how the processes of growing up and organising sex, money and power in society have created an unhealthy imbalance in their lives and in society as a whole.

This book is based on a firm belief in the value of marriage and the family, both to those who enter into such a commitment and to the common good. It is not, however, a bland endorsement of those institutions as we know them because so much of what passes for ‘happy family life’ and the ‘perfect marriage’ is an excuse for inequality, abuse and the oppression of women and children – and of men, too, in paradoxical ways.

I do not see families as inherently patriarchal or violent or oppressive. Instead I see families as the very basis of learning how to care and share, the source of both individual identity and social understanding, the crucible of competence in children and the motivating force of productive achievement in adults. Families can also be, of course, vicious little enclaves of prejudice and violence, but that is not their most common mode. They are infinitely adaptable organisations, vital to resisting the dictates of planners and dogmatists of every kind, the locus of social change through their constant testing of the practical limits of what becomes taken for granted as ‘normal’ and therefore ‘normative’ in a prescriptive sense. Men, women and children in families together forge new pathways that will work for them. Despite mistakes and blunders along the way, adaptability and tolerance of change are the only answer in a society becoming more complex and more global by the minute.

This is not a book in defence of men – I am convinced that many of the male-dominated institutions and customs of our society are pathetically flawed and I have no sympathy for men who feel threatened by the new-won ‘freedoms’ of ‘liberated women’, freedoms that men have held closely in their clutches for centuries and which account for a lot of human misery. On the other hand I have little patience with guru recommendations to recapture the ‘flow of masculinity’ and insist that ‘men should be men’ as though that had one meaning only.¹

Nor is the book an argument that men are solely responsible for the oppression of women. Women as mothers are the purveyors of sexism to children as much as men are and many women perpetuate the norms of macho masculinity that other women (and men) abhor. My call is for a sensible recognition of the complex economic and cultural changes that have altered marriages and families forever.

It will not do either, to assert that marriage is an outmoded institution and the ‘family’ is dead. Human beings are enormously inventive and they can meet their financial and emotional needs through various forms of partnership, including gay and lesbian ‘marriages’, group living, even living alone with an ongoing relationship outside. But the majority will always settle with a mate of the opposite sex, will have children and will live in units we shall always call families. And our task at this time of enormous change is to invent new and more satisfactory forms of marital mateship which go beyond the oppressions and inequalities of the past, are better for us all as individuals, whether child or adult.

The view put here is that marriage is a partnership where changing resources and power affect the way couples construct their relationship. Families are arenas of ‘cooperative conflict’, a place of negotiation and compromise, not some rosy little ‘haven in a heartless world’ of perfect love and harmony, and not just a scene of violent patriarchy either.²

None of the simplistic debate about men vs women helps us move forward very much. My reading of the literature has convinced me of two things. One is that despite its excesses, the ‘women’s movement’ has clearly identified a problem that must be addressed if society is to develop in a more civilised manner.

It is absolutely clear that men are not wimpishly searching for a new self-definition, rather, too many of them are still flagrantly exploiting their advantages as men. So instead of looking at how women are disadvantaged, it may be time to start identifying those things which continue to advantage men, particularly those things which ‘institutionalise’ male advantage in ways that are not obvious but have a powerful effect.

The second is that most of the writing about men is special pleading for one cause or another, seldom based on research about ordinary men, too often drawing on the clinical descriptions of men in counselling or men for whom the struggle was so great they had to seek a support group of like-minded men. Though they offer new insights into men’s health, the ‘traps’ of being male, the shift in social expectations about what a ‘normal’ male is supposed to do, many of these books ignore the larger-scale research on marriage and families.

My own understanding of social change in Australia led me to the view that, despite widespread confusion and uncertainty, men are still firmly in control and, thank you very much, not about to give up their power willingly to ‘these women’. It is not so much a male backlash as a male monolith and it will take a lot more push and shove to budge its control in areas that matter.

At the same time, it is clear that men put great store in family values, are often given a bad press unjustly, and many of them are, in fact, struggling valiantly to come to grips with the new realities of a more equal partnership in personal and public life. Their focus is the family still; their main source of support their wife and family. Ronald Conway in his book Land of the Long Weekend cynically called this the ‘romantically anticipated suburban love-nest’, which became a trap for young mothers, who then turned into ‘Magna Martyrs’, and pushed fathers into a ‘po-faced limbo on the edge of family experience’. His vicious description of modern Australian woman as ‘a Mata Hari of the nature strip ready to desert her man and her overborne brood for the emancipated life’, and of ‘the Australian matrist male who now needs the nest more than the women’,³ still cries for contradiction.

It was clear also that glib assertions about the Aussie male’s inability to ‘communicate’, his sullen conformity and emotional constipation ignored the fact that men and women construct a ‘conversation’ together, and for most of them the marital conversation is a long and truly satisfying one. In this book I use the words of many individual men who give the lie to this notion of male muteness.

What the research also reveals is that men are very caring fathers, concerned about their family’s wellbeing, and they show that concern by sticking with lousy jobs and working long hours that often damage their own health and quality of life. Together with their ‘true blues’, they are struggling to cope with the need for both to earn some income, bring up their children decently in what is now a very hurried and insecure consumer society, adjust their personal relationships within an unyeilding social system that offers scant support for the family that is trying hard to do its best.

For most Australian men, ‘the wife’ is their best mate, and they acknowledge this despite their frequent diversions into the camaraderie of the pub and the footy oval. So somehow the old mateship myth has been transformed into qualities of trust, loyalty and affection within the family rather than outside it. And this theme seemed worth exploring in more detail. Historically it was not men who produced and women who reproduced; they did both together. And for men, the silent warriors of popular literature and feminist myth, their wife was their best mate, their cobber, their true blue, the only one who could be trusted and confided in, the only one to whom weaknesses could be disclosed. And that makes mateship a major theme for re-examination because I think we may have been sold a pup, a straw man set up by our intellectuals that has obscured the real nature of nation-building and identity – the essential gender cooperation that underpins society itself.

It may seem odd, even a little outmoded, to use the word ‘mateship’ in a book about the transformation of marriage as an institution. But mateship has become one of those icon terms that recurs in Australian political conjuring and still resonates in everyday Australian life. Mateship conjures up images of men in quiet communion with one another. Inarticulate, more likely to give you a thump on the shoulder than a hug, working side-by-side and ready to stick together against the boss, the bully or the outsider. Men who don’t talk, or disclose their true feelings, maybe not even seeing one another for months or years but still claiming ‘He’s my mate’. Yet mateship is a complex idea. Diggers on the goldfields rebelling against colonial authority; diggers in the trenches fighting for God, King and Country; the matiness of unions and the Labor Party struggling against the establishment; the back-slapping clubbiness of male groups such as Rotary; the beer-swilling, pants-dropping foolery of a footy team, are all aspects of the masculine culture.

Many have noted the powerful, sublimated homosexuality of this informal male bonding and its deep antipathy to women. Men, Mateship, Marriage expounds a different view - one that holds that mateship and marriage share two common elements: a sense of mutual trust between friends which affirms the self, and a real sense of responsibility for one another’s well-being. Moreover, mateship has taken on a much broader meaning in Australian society.

Its latest manifestation is in the lament (July 1996) of Prime Minister John Howard at ‘the loss of mateship and community’. He, like others before him, referred to the ‘outpouring of community concern’ at the time of the 1995 Sydney Bushfires as proof that ‘the spirit was still alive’. In essence, that essential Australian spirit ‘is the sense of community and mateship and looking after each other in adversity which you find in rural Australia’. Rural style, adversity, concern for others, community cooperation, and the setting aside of differences – all somewhat suspect in a nation with a history of coastal urban sprawl, family ‘autonomy’, male exclusion of women, racism and increasing disparity of wealth.

Not surprisingly, there was a chorus of derision from Mr Howard’s critics. Donald Horne raged that ‘It’s nostalgic bullshit’, that ‘mateship in its narrow sense was a mechanism of exclusive male bonding which was harshly conformist’. Novelist Elizabeth Jolley agreed that a return to nostalgia resulted from people being ‘disoriented by the pace of social change’. Magistrate Pat O’Shane pointed out that ‘the common image of mateship was forged by early Anglo-Australians relying on one another to survive in a hostile landscape. If it’s that sort of thing that Mr Howard is trying to revive in some sort of appeal to nostalgia he is either incredibly stupid and shallow or he is exceedingly devious and hypocritical’.

Musician Dave Graney undermined the rural notion of community as an element of mateship. ‘I’ve experienced life in the country and it’s full of insane violence and boredom … there are people who will look out for other people in the old neighbourhoods of cities as well as the country.’ And Sporting Shooters’ Association President Ted Drane came closest to the original usage of mateship by having another hit at multiculturalism: ‘We are losing a sense of community and it’s because we’re becoming a nation of tribes. I’m not against multiculturalism but people are quite happy these days to never move outside their cultural group. It’s come down to the point where the Anglo Celt culture seems to be being diminished.’⁴ Such sentiments have been given wider currency by MHR Pauline Hanson and her populist attacks on the selective benefits of the former Labor Government’s interest group politics. Mateship seems for some still confined to White Anglo-Saxons, but the females are in there in full force.

So, the concept of mateship is still alive and well, and being used to cover much wider meanings than it originally had. Even Donald Horne suggests that ‘in a broader, more generous definition it could mean a sense of common humanity’. Interestingly, that is the sense in which former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, used the term, in attempting to convince our Asian neighbours that we do not claim to be ‘Asian’ but distinctively Australian (January, 1996). ‘… Mateship expresses an ethic of communitarianism and mutual obligation which in other contexts is called Asian… The importance of the family, the benefit of education, the need for order and public accountability, the inherent value of work – most Australians I know would describe these as Australian values.’

While this was no doubt stretching a long bow in the Land of the Long Weekend, it indicates that mateship is a catch-all concept still relevant in the Australian culture and is still used for political ends. Its recurring appeal and the widening of its meaning also suggest a point which is often overlooked and which will be developed in this book: mateship is not the domain of men alone, it is a broader community value, rooted in the centrality of family life.

And the most meaningful sense in which the term ‘mate’ is used applies to our marriage partners. It is a usage unique to Australian culture, though it also throws light on marital relations in all those countries where the individual’s interests can be negotiated relatively free of rigid social norms.

Male ‘mateship’ is real and has its virtues; but so too is the deeper mateship of husbands and wives negotiating and enjoying a life together in that suburban backyard that offers freedom, security and the chance to express individual creativity. In other words, this book is an act of reclamation, even quiet celebration, of the virtues of male – female mateship, marriage and the family. To convince readers of the validity of this view, it has been necessary to go back to basics, to the origins and historical development of relationships in Western society, and to expose those myths and legends that get in the way of a better understanding of men and women and their lives together.

It is a fascinating story and one that will become even more interesting as we move into the next century. Systems of social relationships that ‘worked’ for people in the past are no longer meeting the ‘reality test’ of longer life spans, more open access to the resources of the good life, and values that place individual choice and autonomy above social conformity and inequality. Everything now is open to negotiation and nothing can be taken for granted. This makes for a certain unease – it’s always easier if the choices are restricted – but also for a more interesting life, one in which we learn to live with our own decisions and forge our own directions.

I have also drawn on a vast array of recent research on marriage, the family and gender differences. My goal has been to sift through the evidence and offer my own conclusions, not to be ‘fair’ or ‘academic’ and describe every bit of conflicting data. The words of over a hundred men I have interviewed (non-randomly) give flesh to the bones of more quantitative research, based on surveys of thousands of men and women, but my comments on their views are my own. My hope is that this shifting across historical, social and personal material will help concerned men and their partners to make sense of very complex issues, to sort out the babble from the substance and suggest what may be discarded and what preserved in building a sharing partnership of mutual benefit and satisfaction.

I try to show how so many situations in today’s world work against the sort of ‘marital mateship’ that is to be preferred and suggest ways to alter those social structures (particularly work structures) that serve as blockages to change. But this is not a ‘guru’ book of advice and I do not purport to have all the answers. There are no ‘Seven Steps to Success’ here to be found and followed blindly. The whole argument is that times are complex, and solutions will be as varied as the people seeking to work things out.

The true measure of a ‘man’ is his ability to mate without the sexist baggage so many of us have had to carry. Being a ‘real man’ is not to be measured by his ability to control or dominate others, rather by his capacity to create a companionable, sharing marriage and father children in an intimate and loving way. Thus I have tried to spell out in this book why so many men have been boxed into a macho maze and how they might be helped out of it. This boils down to a challenge for all of us, and society in general, to create the situations and circumstances which will allow men and women to live in more productive and equal partnership as ‘married mates’.

But the spirit of the book and its central theme of male – female mateship as an exciting and fulfilling pursuit owes most to my best mate – Patricia – without whom life would be dull indeed. Her energy, intelligence, unrelenting honesty and loving companionship have given me a family I am proud to call ours, not mine, a life we have built together, not alone, a past, present and future where the butterflies sing.

Part 1

Marriage and masculinity

Chapter 1

What makes a man a man?

The writer Paul Theroux once said:

I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood … is pitiful, a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one’s entire life. Even the expression ‘be a man’ strikes me as insulting and abusive. It means to be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient and soldierly, and stop thinking … The youth who is subverted, as most are, into believing in the masculine ideal, is effectively separated from women – it is the most savage tribal logic – and he spends the rest of his life finding women a riddle and a nuisance … There would be no point in saying any of this if it were not generally believed that to be a man is somehow – even now in feminist-influenced America – a privilege. It is, on the contrary, an unmerciful and punishing burden … And this is also why men often object to feminism and are afraid to explain why. Of course women have a justified grievance, but most men believe – and with reason – that their lives are much worse.¹

A similar but perhaps more balanced view was expressed by the Swedish Working Party on ‘The Changing Role of the Male’ in 1986.

We men are the prisoners of a system for which we ourselves are primarily responsible. A system that is not only detrimental to us as men but also postulates a role for women that renders any equality between the sexes impossible. Our male role makes us both oppressors and oppressed.²

What is it that makes a man? For most men it’s a non-question because the answer is so obvious. It’s ‘not being a woman’ and all that entails - not being soft, not crying when hurt, not staying at home to do the housework or look after the kids. But manhood should not be defined only in terms of negatives. Being a man means being strong, tough, brave, ambitious, hard-working, leading and taking the initiative, protecting his wife and kids from harm. Even these contrasting lists of qualities suggest how loose is the dividing line, especially now that lots of men do stay at home; some wives earn larger incomes than their husbands, and not all men are ambitious, brave or even protective when needed. Masculinity is very much subject to the changing societal constraints on what men and women actually do.

Males and sexuality

So, far too often, men define their manhood in terms of the appendage they have, and which women do not, their power to penetrate, impregnate and control the sexual dance of life. Ex-Prime Minister Bob Hawke seems to think that parading round in bathers is what it is all about, though ex-Governor-General Bill Hayden was not impressed and called the fuss ‘making too much out of a very little thing’.³ This sort of ‘cheap shot’ typifies male fears and rivalry. The size of your ‘equipment’ represents status and power and the parade of naked males in football dressing rooms is part of a very general ritual. Every boy is fascinated to see how big other boys’ penises are, even when they are grown men.

I very clearly recall my early concerns on this count. As a child, bath time on Saturday nights was fun until I became aware that nakedness was something you did not expose to your mother or your sisters (after years of uninhibited lack of concern). This came more from other boys than from my family. On one occasion, I was laughed at by Dad and his mates for turning away shyly as we all peed at the side of the road, noticing for the first time how big theirs were compared with my little winkler.

Then there was the fascination of pre-adolescence. Before I could get an erection, or knew what it was, I watched in amazement as one boy tried to ‘pull off’ another in a public toilet while several others gathered around. Months later, the sport at school was to compare erections and penis shapes, foreskins or not, and for some boys to hold their erections, concealed from the teacher but not from the girls in the desk in front. I remember being shocked (and stirred) by a friend’s story about how his older brother had put his dick, full length, ‘into the hole’ of the little girl next door, and how ‘brave’ she was to let him do it. Not full sex, but the first experience of penetration. The photo (processed at home, not through the local pharmacy) of another boy’s sister, naked, legs widely splayed, was my first picture of a vagina, and my first inkling that girls might be a willing party to all this ‘dirty stuff’.

Doubtless all men can recall similar experiences. The common thread is penis size, penetration and the thrill of ejaculation. That did not come for me until about age twelve, and then it was a dim awareness on waking that there was a delicious pain in my groin and a sticky wetness there that I had never known before. After that, masturbation became a major source of pleasure and relief (it wasn’t called ‘fun’ until the musical Hair in the 1960s). It was done secretly and with great guilt and the fear that something like that was a ‘drain’ on your manhood – rather hard to reconcile with the male ethos that the more often you could ‘do it’ (with a woman) the more of a man you were.

Most men (and most initiation rituals) measure ‘manhood’ in terms of the capacity for penetrative sex. One interviewee, Carl, when asked what makes a man said, simply, ‘Sex!’. He had always been a loving little boy, a ‘goody two-shoes’ for his mother, and it was not until Carl realised his capacity for sex that he thought of himself as a real man. His first wife had regarded him as a mummy’s boy because he was always trying to please her.

I think she was saying I wasn’t man enough. It was a gross mismatch. I remember a priest (one I greatly admired) saying to a girl I was dancing with, ‘He’s such a prick, what’re you going out with him for, a goody-goody …?’. It shattered my belief system – if you do bad, you’re unattractive and no good, but you mustn’t be too good. Now, if I lose my block, screw up, say nasty things, others have to accept that. You have to have a bit of the cunt in you to be a good manager (a real man).

But men are (despite some doubts to the contrary) more than just animals wanting to have sex. Moreover, men can have penetrative sex other than with women and this makes the notion of ‘what is a man’ or the essence of ‘masculinity’ much more complicated. If men have sex with animals, they are seen as perverts; if they have it with other men, they are vilified as homosexuals and not ‘normal’. The difficulty is that bestiality and homosexuality have been common throughout human history, and homosexuality has not always been treated as abnormal or unmasculine.

So being masculine is not the same as being male, and preoccupation with sex is not an exclusively male concern. The doe-eyed heroines of romance novels had the hots for a male lover as much as an eye on who would be a good provider. Nature has designed bodies and sex drives for the fundamental purpose of reproduction and genetic survival, and despite the human being’s capacity to complicate it all with added meanings and emotions, sex and sexual difference lie at the basis of most gender interaction. Masculinity therefore varies with the social uses to which it is put. It is never one simple quality of all men, despite the strong pressures put on males to conform to a socially-defined model of ‘being a man’. Even sexuality, and its uses, has varied throughout time.

Why do people have sex? Or more to the point, what are the uses to which sex has been put? For the pagans, sex was not a sordid act, but part of the renewal process and kinship with nature. The Masai in East Africa gave up months to sexual feasting, abandoning all the usual restrictions of friendships and kinship. The Chinese believed sex was a safeguard against illness, a way of strengthening men; they also insisted that the woman’s satisfaction should be ensured. The Kama Sutra was written by an Indian celibate, and used as a stimulus by the wealthy, but may have had the odd effect of limiting the erotic imagination.⁴ The current ‘Queer’ movement (as opposed to ‘Gay’) claims to be pushing the frontiers of both hetero- and homosexuality, as a sort of assertion of difference from the mainstream.

The prophet Muhammed loved women, married his first wife (a strong and independent business woman) at the age of twenty-five, and extolled women’s right to sexual pleasure, declaring intercourse without foreplay to be a form of torture. Indeed, Muslims see the West’s sexual excesses as ‘an inevitable reaction to churches that tried to suppress and make shameful the God-given sexual urge’.⁵ The horrors of genital mutilation of girls and the stoning of adulterous women are not practised across the whole of Islam and are not part of the obligatory traditions of Islam (haram and wajib) but are disputed aspects of the less binding makruh (discouraged and unbecoming acts) or sunnat (desirable but not obligatory acts). One of the few grounds for a woman to initiate divorce under Islamic law is the husband’s failure to have sex with her at least once in every four months.

Fear of homosexuality

Sexuality is complex and has taken many forms, heterosexuality being only one of them, albeit the one most likely and most sanctioned by social custom. In the Greek macho male culture, homosexual relations between adolescent boys, or between boys and their older male mentors, was seen as part of their education in sexuality, not as the ‘perversion’ of homosexuality. During the Taiping Rebellion of 1850, six thousand boy captives were castrated to be used as male prostitutes, with bound feet and heavy makeup.

Australian men have been terrified of being called a ‘poofter’ or a ‘fairy’. The more modern term ‘gay’ is only slightly less opprobrious. And sport provides a central field for that ambivalence, fear and rejection, because it is the one location where physical touching, the expression of affection and the display of one’s body seem to be acceptable for men. The ambiguities abound.

Many men find their masculinity in pumping iron in city gymnasiums, creating the narcissistic body beautiful. Some of them are gay and ‘masculinity’ has trouble coping with that variation on a theme. The male body beautiful has figured large in history, from its emphasis in classical Greek culture (warlike in Sparta, body and mind together in Athens), to the sculptures of Michelangelo and other Renaissance artists, and the film genres of the twentieth century, always with homoerotic overtones, but always ‘masculine’ rather than effetely ‘feminine’. This is because the ‘perfect’ body, the most beautiful specimen, always has the upper hand; it attracts the opposite sex for mating purposes, but it is attractive in its own right so is a calling sign for any sexual competition.

‘Homosexual’ means simply attraction to and sex with a person of the same sex. Its negative connotations arise only because of social customs at certain points in history. In prisons, male sex is not regarded as homosexual, but is part of a rampant male dominance structure and an outcome of a sex-deprived situation. In military service, where males are thrown together without women, sexual interaction is common, and the association of war with rape grows out of the link between violence, sexual arousal and sexual deprivation as well as its symbolic assertion of superiority over the conquered men and their powerless women.⁶

Thus, homosexuality is one of the greatest challenges to the idea of there being one uniform quality, or one set of characteristics, that we can call ‘masculinity’. The recurrent vilification and persecution of homosexuals is testimony to their universal presence in history. Sexual relations between men have passed through four phases, each of which now co-exists.⁷ At first, it was a conservative force, a ritual form of behaviour which strengthened male institutions. Homosexuality had always been a divine source of pleasure, so was acceptable as a model for ordinary mortals. The military often saw it as a unifying strength. Japanese samurai took along young male sexual partners. Celtic warriors were offended if their advances were rejected. The Greeks saw it as part of preparation for citizenship and married life for their younger partners. Having male followers was a source of status, the Elizabethan rakes parading a woman on one arm and a catamite on the other. The boarding school follows common tribal practices from around the world.

Even the Catholic Church tolerated homosexuality because it was so ‘public’, and priestly hanky panky with women was more widely condemned than homosexuality. Only when the church began wholesale persecution of heresies, leading to the Inquisition, was it condemned, and then it became a form of social rebellion. Even up till the nineteenth century, men who visited ‘molly-houses’ in London, or the Tahitian men who used the village’s male prostitutes, were not regarded as homosexuals.

The term itself was first used in 1869 by Benkert in Vienna, to describe a ‘third sex’ who could not help their proclivity and who could not therefore be condemned. This approach remains today in the assertion of genetic predisposition. Many of the world’s most creative talents have been homosexual, their names being now invoked in praise of ‘difference’ – from da Vinci, Newton, Keynes, Beethoven, Hans Christian Anderson and Robert Louis Stevenson. This assertion of difference, coming out of the closet, masked the underlying search for a less guiltridden sexuality than existed in Europe, and the escape from violence or domination to a freer, more mutual relationship. This is the theme Giddens picks up in his book, The Transformation of Intimacy,⁸ the notion that sexual relationships free of the gender power struggle, from reproduction and parenthood, might open up new possibilities. Nothing much in the sexual arena is new, only the social openness with which it is practised.

Quite clearly, much of the growth of homosexual behaviour has nothing to do with ‘genetic’ proclivities, but with the greater opportunity structures of modern urban society and the loosening of strictures against any form of sexual pleasure. If sexual