A few years ago I was talking to a sex therapist who had been practicing for many years. We were talking about what he thought was most helpful to his clients. He said that one of his most important roles was reassuring people they were normal. He described client after client who would sit down in his office, often wracked with guilt and full of shame about some aspect of their sexual desires or practices, and how their entire demeanor and outlook would change once they shared their story and he told them that he had heard it all before.
That what they believed to be their singular freakish secret was actually something not entirely uncommon. That it was, in his words, perfectly normal.
Sex educators use normal in this therapeutic way as well. The phrase, “everything is normal” has become a kind of comforting mantra for a certain kind of sex educator and a growing number of sex advice columnists, coaches, and self-appointed gurus. It’s understood to be a mark of sex positivity and progressiveness. No judgement. Everything is good.
I’m sympathetic to the impulse, but to me this response has always felt a bit hollow. In part that’s because when I hear people say it I just don’t believe them. It sounds like a line; a kind of mean-nothing cure-all. Obviously this is my personal response, but I have a pretty finely honed BS detector and most of these people don’t actually follow through on their “it’s all good” message. They seem to be full of judgement, full of righteous opinions, and clearly have ideas about what is good and what is bad, right and wrong, when it comes to sexuality.
We should all have a chance to develop our own ideas of goodness and badness in the context of sexuality, so it isn’t that people who say “it’s all good” are wrong (any more than people who say “it’s all bad“).
But to re-work a famous Presidential phrase: you can’t tell all of the people it’s all good all of the time. Doing so may feel good, but it can be more of a hindrance than a help in the long run.
And that brings us to the other reason such claims feel false. Normal just doesn’t work that way in practice.
Telling someone they are normal may provide momentary relief. But once they aren’t talking with you, when they are out in the world they’ll be reminded almost immediately that not everything is treated as normal.
When they share a desire or a fetish, a fantasy or even an opinion that isn’t normative, they’ll be judged for it. Sexual normality and sexual normativity are complicated and slippery concepts, but they also carry tremendous power and heft.
Whether or not we agree that a certain sexual act should be considered normal, we all know that the label of normalcy has palpable effects in the world. To say everything is normal denies the power of normal to affect people for better and for worse and in the end that doesn’t help anyone.
I’ve been trying to think of a good analogy for what I think is problematic about using normality to try and help people explore and express their sexuality. What first came to my mind was that using normal to help people with sexuality is like using a gun to promote peace. It’s a good line, but I think it’s imprecise. Instead I’ve come up with this:
Using normality to alleviate sexual shame is like using capitalism to alleviate poverty. Capitalism creates, distributes, and requires poverty. Sexual normalcy creates, distributes, and requires sexual shame. There is no capitalism without poverty. And there is no sexual normalcy without sexual shame.
This means, among other things, that the problem with normal isn’t just that it’s too narrowly defined. The problem is systemic; it’s built right into the concept. After all normality itself is defined more by what it isn’t, by what is considered abnormal, than it is defined by what it is.
Definitions of deviant or exceptional sexuality precede definitions of normal sexuality. We came up with the construct of homosexuality before we came up with heterosexuality, we defined and labelled transgender before we identified and labelled people as cis-gender. Normal relies on the marginalization of some to define others. Adding to those in the center doesn’t stop the force of pushing others to the margins. And simply telling people on the margins that they’re actually in the center doesn’t alleviate the very real pressures pushing them out if it.
The Bottom Line
So is the answer that nothing is normal? Are we supposed to stop using that word altogether? And isn’t there anything we can agree on about what is normal sexuality?
These are all good questions, and anyone who offers simple answers shouldn’t be trusted. The word normal is important and shouldn’t be thrown out, especially if it’s only to be replaced by a different word that does the exact same thing. Norms are important for researching and understanding human behavior and global health. I think the bottom line is that we have to stop using normal as a one size fits all solution to sexual insecurity and shame. A colleague of mine put it another way: instead of focusing so much on what normal is we’d be better off focusing on what normal does. It seems to me a good place to start.
