Lesbian Sexuality/Female Sexuality: Searching for Sexual Subjectivity

Sociobiology posits inherent differences between male and female sexuality based on its reproductive significance. According to ethologists, the female is preoccupied with the fitness of her sexual partner for fathering healthy children, supporting her, and protecting her during her mothering years, ensuring the continuation of her own genetic heritage; the male is concerned with impregnating as many females as possible, increasing his chances of a genetic future (Batten, 1992). In humans the same instinctual desires are presumed to operate, just slightly out of awareness. They are manifested in the stereotypical woman's attraction to an older, richer, and more powerful man and the stereotypical man's interest in younger women (whose fertility is high) and in nonmonogamy. Psychodynamic theory obviously posits other bases (intrapsychic and interpersonal family dynamics) for sexual patterns and partner choices.

Sociobiology acknowledges the role of cultural representations—their power to shape internal life and external behavior—but its view is that biology will often override culture or at least strongly influence the individual. Psychoanalytic theory has not contributed much analysis of the role of social imagery in shaping individual desire. The question is, Do cultural images of sexual desire follow from innate interests or do they construct them? The diversity of sexual expression across cultures and historical time challenges the adequacy of a biologically based view of human sexuality. Psychodynamic theory, keeping its focus narrowly within the individual and the family, also fails to account for such cross-cultural and historical diversity. Western cultural norms are treated as universals requiring little elaboration.