In 2016, a then-puzzling study was published that showed that approximately one in five sexually active, openly lesbian-identified teen girls had recently had a male sex partner.
This type of disparity has become less surprising in the seven years that have followed. While lesbian and bisexual women’s sexuality has historically been the subject of scrutiny—and the reasons why a lesbian-identified woman may engage in sex acts with a man are varied—I’m not speaking here of skepticism or compulsory heterosexuality.
On the contrary, as acceptance of minority sexual orientations and gender identity have grown, these categories have become much more nebulous. Rather than being guided by physical experience, one’s sexuality and gender identity are now determined by something much harder to define: feelings. The YouTuber Contrapoints may have put it best in a now-deleted tweet: “Gen Z people are hard to figure out. They’re like ‘I’m an asexual slut that loves sex! You don’t have to be trans to be trans. Casual reminder that your heterosexuality doesn’t make your gayness any less valid!”
To Zoomers, the tweet read like a mean-spirited joke—even, to some, as bigotry. Still, it accurately characterized Gen Z’s relationship to self-identification. Zoomers, who identify as LGBTQIA+ at higher rates than any previous generation, are not only liberal with how they apply sexual classification, they’re downright creative with it. Formerly well-defined boundaries, like “lesbian” or, more fundamentally, “woman” are being completely deconstructed.
In a recent article for Compact, Geoff Shullenberger described this shift away from sexual orientation as being a label to describe a set of behaviors, or, at a minimum, a specific type of embodied attraction. Writing about the strange preponderance of “sexually active asexuals,” he says:
The decoupling of sexual identity from sex is evident beyond asexuality itself. … The regime Foucault describes, which emerged from 19th-century science, transferred the primary locus of sex from body to soul and recast the relevant sex acts and outward manifestations as external expressions of an inner essence.
He goes on: “Identity categories no longer cast a particular subset of behavior as the effect of a particular identity, but rather function as an end in themselves, potentially coexisting with any conceivable acts or expressions, or none at all.”
In other words, sexual orientation no longer has anything to do with who you actually have sex with.
Fandoms, Online Networks, and Sexual Identification
Progressive Zoomers would say this decoupling of sexual activity from identity befits the complexity of these categories: they’re as fluid as an individual’s feelings, and their meaning evolves with one’s environment and internal state. But what, ultimately, is so “complex” about sex that it defies language? Culture war skeptics cynically suggest skyrocketing rates of bisexuality are a result of some combination of attention-seeking, social contagion, or mental illness, but this underestimates the fundamental shift in how we conceptualize gender identity and sexuality.
Another theory is that some identities have been subsumed into online affinity networks— participatory digital communities driven by a specific interest. This shift has been fueled by changes in the lifestyles of the upper middle and middle classes, which have become increasingly untethered from geography. In Affinity Online, Rachel Cody Pfister and Crystle Martin described how “online access is tied to a growing and flexible palette of choices for affiliation and a resulting shift away from affinities grounded in local places and organizations.” Online affinity networks sometimes also intersect with fandoms—for example, a Harry Potter-themed doll-making community on Facebook—but aren’t fandoms per se, which require an element of consumerism. Instead, the digital era has seen the transformation of these traditional physical spaces into platforms where people can connect over shared interests, making online affinity networks an inclusive space where geographical location is no barrier to participation.
The existing academic literature primarily focuses on the digitization of hobbies and niche interests (like professional wrestling, the creation of anime music videos, or knitting). However, one can easily imagine how this logic might extend to other aspects of one’s identity. If your hobbies are no longer bound by what’s in your immediate vicinity, then perhaps nothing else needs to be either, especially as other forms of physical community vanish. As our lifestyles become more internet-based and therefore disembodied, we see a distinct shift in people choosing identities that interest them or, as Shullenberger describes, reflect their “internal essence.” This starkly contrasts with identity labels—like “lesbian”—that once represented a lived experience, inherited trait, or behavioral pattern.
This shift isn’t limited to sexuality. The term “Latina,” for example, no longer necessarily describes the experience of being from Latin America or even being an active member in a Latin-American diaspora. Over the last decade or so, unspoken freedom has emerged in how one identifies their heritage that will rarely be questioned in social settings. In more extreme examples, people will be revealed as complete charlatans, like Hilaria Baldwin or Rachel Dolezal. But less extreme examples—people who lean into one heritage or another, despite being several generations removed and typically completely unembedded in the culture or the diaspora—are so ubiquitous as to go completely unnoticed.
It’s not that these individuals are lying, exactly. Rather, it’s that the purpose labels serve has evolved over time. Many identity categories do not function to describe one’s lived experience. Thus the label “lesbian” no longer necessarily describes the experience or behavioral patterns of same-sex attraction.
“The Experience of Alterity”
Gay and lesbian identities were uniquely situated to undergo this shift from “experience-based” to “affinity-based” identification. One reason for that is, as Alexander Cho writes in Networked Affect, homosexuals often have had to exist “between the lines.” By nature, “queer culture,” if such a thing exists, is “ephemeral, unofficial, evasive”—in Cho’s words, “an archive of feelings.” In a climate where one is already trafficking in winks and dog whistles and artifacts that are “guilty-by-association,” it’s relatively easy to blend in with the right signifiers. This is even more true in the disembodied environment of cyberspace, where there is no opportunity to discount or discredit one’s group membership through behavior (or the lack thereof).
Online, even more than in the physical world, homosexuality is, according to Cho:
the experience of alterity … the dark optimism of a hovering possibility for community, the release of self-expression in the midst of a system that you perceive to be tilted against you, and the potential for kinship and intimacy outside of heteronormative family and relationship structures.
Cho notes that this is true even “regardless of any one person’s overt claim to static sexual orientation.” Cho describes how taken aback he was by the micro-blogging platform Tumblr because of how well it distilled “queer affect” without the use of text. He says, “All there was was the gist.” By contrast, on the blogs of Cho’s youth, people communicated through the text-based “literal testimonials” of their sexual experiences. In other words, Tumblr was the first place where Cho encountered the “vibes”—another word for sensibility or affect—that are now an animating force on the Internet.
Vibes were easy to curate on Tumblr because the website favored curation over creation. He describes the difference between a platform like LiveJournal, which relied on text, with Tumblr:
The experience of Tumblr is less like reading a LiveJournal blog and more like walking through a million different constantly shifting galleries—both may contain serious emotional heft and personal investment, but the latter relies much more on aesthetics, intimation, sensibility, and movement—in short, affect. … We don’t really know the stories behind these vintage posts. Without any sort of caption or credit viewers are simply left to fill in the blanks with their own assumptions of who these people are.
This empty space creates fluidity in what a label like “lesbian” can mean to the user, while also allowing people to engage in online behaviors that had a “gay vibe.” These behaviors might include sharing, creating, and consuming content in a community setting. The user is in some sense “participating” in a homosexually coded community, but their behavior is untethered from sex. It is no longer necessary to be a homosexual to be gay; only to have an affinity for and a talent for projecting the homosexual affect.
Again, sexual orientation isn’t the only place where this shift is seen. One—rather extreme—example is “wannarexia,” a slang term describing people who engage in online spaces for anorexia without themselves suffering from the disorder. “Wannarexia” and pro-anorexia culture more generally emerged for a complex web of reasons. The Internet allowed it to proliferate, evolve, and become consumable, making it accessible to new groups of people.
If anorexia, for example, is a moodboard and discourse, and not a set of harmful behaviors that require clinical treatment, then it is, in theory, open to anyone who feels an affinity towards it. Anorexia evolves from a diagnosis to a music playlist, a style of imagery, and an aesthetic, all in service to a “vibe.” The behaviors associated with it shift from restrictive dieting to cultivating a sensibility—expressing thinness without needing to be thin. If your day-to-day life is more predicated on digital behaviors than embodied ones, one can easily imagine how these identities feel real to the user, even though they are not lived in the traditional sense. They become real enough to say, “I’m a lesbian,” without ever engaging in the behaviors that would conventionally label a person as such.
Sexual orientation was especially well-suited to this shift, because the affect that connotes homosexuality was already well-established before the Internet. There was already a robust canon of film, literature, color palettes, and imagery that evoked homosexuality–ripe for sharing on the Internet.
Truly, homosexuality has become “queer.” To paraphrase an obscure text from the nineties, “I don’t know what [queer] is, but it’s not gay sex.”
Here’s what it is: a sensibility that can resonate with anyone, regardless of their physical-world behavior.
