Adrienne Rich's essay constitutes a powerful challenge to some of our least examined sexual assumptions. Rich turns all the familiar arguments on their heads: If the first erotic bond is to the mother, she asks, could not the "natural" sexual orientation of both men and women be toward women? Rich's radical questioning has been a major intellectual force in the general feminist reorientation to sexual matters in recent years, and her conception of a "lesbian continuum" sparked especially intense debate. Does lesbianism incorporate all support systems and intense interactions among women, or is it a specifically erotic choice? What is gained and what is lost with the second, narrower definition? Rich's assumptions also usefully raise the more general theoretical question: Is adult sexuality so closely associated with the infant bond that genuinely satisfying sex relations are likely to be structured primarily around nurturance? I was a woman terribly vulnerable, critical using femaleness as a sort of standard of yardstick to measure and discard men. Yes--something like that. I was an Anna who invited defeat from men without ever being conscious of it. (But I am conscious of it.
And being conscious of it means I shall leave it all behind me and become--but what?) I was stuck fast in an emotion common to women of our time, that can turn them bitter, or Lesbian, or solitary. Yes, that Anna during that time was. The bias of compulsory heterosexuality, through which lesbian experience is perceived on a scale ranging from deviant to abhorrent, or simply rendered invisible, could be illustrated from many other texts than the two just preceding. The assumption made by Rossi, that women are "innately sexually oriented" toward men, or by Lessing, that the lesbian choice is simply an acting-out of bitterness toward men, are by no means theirs alone; they are widely current in literature and in the social sciences.
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