True, it’s annoying to have to skip over the paragraphs about feminism and lesbianism. Unfortunately Norman connects the fantasy roles he prefers with evolution and biology. Evolution created man-the-hunter; therefore, it’s normal and natural and good and right for men to be sexually aggressive and top their female partners. Men have testosterone; therefore, they are ordained by physiology to be masters. This results in the absurd notion that feminists and lesbians are women who have too many male hormones or not enough female hormones or both. Granted, in 1974, pro-pleasure feminism had not gotten much of a start, but it is still grating to see a movement that was mostly concerned with pay equity, protection from sexual violence, and sexual freedom become stereotyped as a man-hating effort to get rid of sex and romance and turn children over to the state to be raised.

But Norman is not the first person to look for a biological explanation to justify his sexual preferences or politics. In The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone argued that the technologically influenced evolution of human beings would eventually eliminate biological sex, reproduction, and childhood. Mary Jane Sherfey, author of The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality, posited a biological basis for the sexual superiority of the human female. In The Descent of Woman, Elaine Morgan constructed a biologically based alternative theory of human prehistory that accounted for a shift from matriarchal to patriarchal culture, as did Merlin Stone in When God Was a Woman. Gay activists as well as feminists have been eager to use biology, genetics, brain chemistry, and medical science to bolster their claims that sexual orientation is fixed, a part of nature, not susceptible to human control or change.

People make these ideological blunders not because they are evil or stupid (or not solely because they are evil or stupid). Such theories are infinitely appealing not only because they exonerate the individual from a charge of moral laxity or mental illness, but because they mirror the way our sexual preferences feel. What arouses each one of us, draws us to another person, or compels us to act out with that partner feels inbred, natural, involuntary. The process of creating a sex life or love life for oneself is at least as much about learning and teaching as it is about discovering one’s secret, innate self; but it feels much more like the latter than the former.