Sometimes I’m made achingly, painfully aware that a large proportion of people don’t seem to realize that attraction isn’t action.
It starts with the same old story: a married couple, totally committed to one another, madly in love, and monogamous. One of them — often the man, since there is the stereotype that men are more likely to be sexually attracted to someone than women are because they’re men — finds themselves attracted to someone outside of their marital unit. The other declares this to be cheating, as though the first had physically fallen naked into the arms of the third party, and fights erupt, the marriage dissolves and everything is terrible.
(There is actually a movie I love called Last Night, in which the wife (Keira Knightly) accuses the husband (Sam Worthington) repeatedly of cheating, because the woman he works with (Eva Mendes) is hot and he’s attracted to her, so clearly he must be cheating with her. The wife makes such a big deal and makes his life such hell, he does indeed end up falling into the other woman’s arms. The interesting part of the movie to me, however, is that the wife conducts her own affair while he’s away on his trip, reconnecting with an ex. Nothing physical happens, it’s all emotional, but the movie leaves you with the question: didn’t she cheat too?)
The weird thing is that even outside of movies and TV shows that use the ‘attraction is cheating’ plot, people seem to continue to believe this, as though attraction is something that you choose.
If that was the case, surely we could all choose who we are attracted to? There would be no situations of realizing, to your horror, that you’re attracted to the most annoying guy in your office, or, for that matter, no situations of realizing you’re attracted to someone in a queer way.
And yet, time and again I notice a trend in which attraction is treated as action, where attraction can even be violence, and attraction has a morality associated with it.
Recently a conference declared that people would have to out themselves and their sexual preference/identity before they can share a room.
The outrage has been both swift and deserved, but I can’t help but notice the same implications are woven into the very threads of what brings this kind of statement about.
It leans in to the current climate of fear of trans people, the pervasive and wholly inaccurate notion that trans women are infiltrating spaces so they can be attracted to women and look at them in private locations. The implication here being that anyone who is attracted will of course act on that attraction in some way — whether that is to look inappropriately or commit acts of violence.
You see it time and again, and without fail it always baffles me.
Attraction is divorced from morality. Attraction is an uncontrolled biological response: your body sees another body it thinks would be good to do sex with and responds accordingly. There’s nothing to be done about that. The morality starts only when attraction leads to action: cheating on a spouse, harassing the attractive barista at the coffee house, letting hands wander inappropriately.
When conservatives spout that lesbians cannot be trusted around women young or old, and that gay men cannot be trusted around men young or old, they are repeating that same rhetoric: that attraction negates safety. It’s the same line that says (heterosexual) men and (heterosexual) women cannot be friends. It’s the same line that says that bisexuals will cheat. It’s the idea that attraction to, for example, men is attraction to all men, irregardless of preference when it comes to specific kinds of men.
It’s hard to express how gross I find it when people outside of right-wing circles also spread the same rhetoric; that bisexuals will cheat because they don’t have a ‘safe’ gender of people to be friends with — unlike heterosexual women who can have ‘safe’ female friends for example — or that sharing a room with someone who is attracted to your gender is unsafe as the default, and a fair reason for someone to be ‘terrified’.
The majority of actual sexual violence is committed by people who are wielding power and are not actually attracted to the person they are victimizing. Prison rape, something the right are so loud about wanting to prevent when it comes to women’s prisons (but so quiet about regarding men’s), is almost always perpetrated by straight men. Attraction has little to nothing to do with it.
People are attracted to other people every day — unless they’re asexual — and yet we act as though the mere feeling of attraction is, in itself, action waiting to happen, practically a done deal.
I think that says a lot more about the people who perpetuate these beliefs than the people they direct them at, don’t you?