How “Fluid” Is Sex?
“The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,” by Hokusai.
JERSEY CITY, APRIL 26, 2026. My pal Michael is a straight white guy, married with two kids. He’s also a philosopher, the kind who puzzles over everything. Like sex.
Or is it gender? I get those terms mixed up. In this column, I’ll stick with “sex,” by which I mean sexual equipment, desire, behavior. What you have, feel, do.
Michael is writing a book about how sex is less fixed and more “fluid” than many straight folk assume, and not just macho, transphobic chest-thumpers. “The fact that even one human being can be gay, queer, or trans,” Michael writes, “shows that all could under the right circumstances.”
That’s a bold thesis, which I take personally. Like Michael, I’m a straight white guy who got married and had two kids. I’ve always found females, umm, sexy. Males, not so much. Are my humdrum predilections biological? Inherited? Fated from birth? Or do they result primarily from cultural conditioning? Brainwashing? And how fluid is my desire, subject to shifts?
Michael says sex cannot be reduced to biology, and I agree. Yes, heterosexuality leads to reproduction, which perpetuates our species. But our reproductive drive has spawned a fantastical variety of non-adaptive spin-offs, or spandrels, from same-sex attraction to monster porn, that defy scientific analysis.
I see sex is as an especially knotty mind-body problem, along with consciousness, free will, the self, solipsism, morality, mental illness and so on. When pondering mind-body problems, I try to stick to the credo: No ideas but in people.
One person who’s shaped my take on sex is my old friend Chris. He’s a smarty-pants, who turned me on to Nietzsche when I was 16, majored in math at Yale and went into the computer biz. Once, when we were high, Chris explained Godel’s theorem to me. I got it! Then forgot it.
When Chris came out in college, his friends weren’t shocked. We probably suspected Chris was queer before he did. He once told me that when he was a boy, seeing other boys naked in a locker room turned him on. Chris assumed other boys felt the same and was surprised to discover not all of us did.
Wait, there’s more. In his 30s Chris met a woman, Jennine, while playing Ultimate Frisbee. Like Chris, Jennine is a smarty-pants, a coder. And like Chris, Jennine leaned gay before she met Chris. Chris and Jennine got married almost 30 years ago. They’re one of the happiest couples I know.
Next up is Alison Gopnik, the psychologist. She always dug guys. Period. She got married, had kids and reached her fifties feeling 100-percent straight. Then Gopnik’s marriage fell apart, and she fell in love with a gay female friend.
After they broke up, Gopnik had hetero and homo dalliances. Then she fell in love with and married a man. Again. Gopnik and her husband, when I met them, seemed enraptured by each other. Giddy.
When I told Gopnik I like females, and only females, she smiled at me. Try making out with a good-looking guy, she said, and see what happens.
Maybe all my life a gay self has lurked in my psyche’s basement, waiting to burst out and yell, Surprise! But I doubt it, and I’m too old and lazy to put my straightness to the test. I feel the same way about my tendency to pair-bond, that is, to glom onto one woman at a time.
A few years ago, Skye, my daughter, introduced me to a trans, polyamorous friend, whom I’ll call Q. When I expressed anthropological interest in polyamory, Q urged me to check out The Ethical Slut, a kind of how-to guide.
Ethical Slut makes polyamory seem exhausting, not fun. I like sex, but I like doing other stuff, too. Like drawing dumpsters, playing hockey, even doing nothing. Ethical Slut made me grateful that I’m a pair-bonder.
As with my fondness for females, I’m not sure if my monogamy stems primarily from nature or nurture. Either way, it feels pretty hard-wired. When I fall in love with one woman, some sort of exclusionary principle kicks in that keeps me from craving someone else.
Evolutionary psychologists say males who pair-bond make better dads. But that utilitarian explanation doesn’t do justice to the intensity of romantic love. What baffles me most is its specificity. Why does the way this particular woman looks, feels, sounds, smells, tastes make me nuts?
Why do I feel good watching my girlfriend, Vicki, sauté asparagus? Why do I enjoy listening to her practice Italian with the mean AI-girl on Duolingo?
Love is a kind of sublime self-gaslighting. Your beloved’s flaws, psychic and physiological, make you love her even more. You glimpse her from a certain awkward angle and your heart goes, Ping!
This is the love that binds Chris and Jennine, and Alison Gopnik and her husband. This love transcends LGBTQ categories. Love, when it lasts, and even when it doesn’t, defies the fluidity of sex and everything else in life. Like aging.
My girlfriend and I aren’t young. Our bodies, you might say, fall short of the classical ideal. I’m not Michelangelo’s David, nor she Botticelli’s Venus. But the marks of mortality she bears make her even dearer to me.
I have two male pals, whom I’ll call Fred and Frank. Fred is in his late 70s, Frank is 80. These guys have always been horndogs, but their libidos are waning, they’ve begun to imagine life without sex. Both insist they will continue to cherish their partners post-sex, and I believe them.
I realize I’ve baited and switched here. I started this column talking about sex and ended talking about love. But come on, of all the weird manifestations of sex, romantic love is the weirdest.
I think of love as a standing wave that suddenly, improbably, pops up amidst all the crosscurrents of desire pushing us this way and that. Love can torment you, break you, it can vanish in an instant. But it can also be so great that you wonder if there is a god after all.
I’d like to thank Michael for inspiring these thoughts. Love you, man.
Further Reading:
Solipsism, Quantum Mechanics and Online Dating
The Statistics of Lovers’ Quarrels
Read also my chapters on Alison Gopnik and trans economist Deirdre McCloskey in my book Mind-Body Problems.